Issued 40 years ago this week, Steely Dan’s sixth studio album “Aja” is still a demarcation point for a great divide among rock listeners. The main bone of contention was picked at in Rolling Stone’s ...

"These people are too fancy, they’re too sophisticated," William S. Burroughs said of Steely Dan in 1977. "They’re doing too many things at once in a song." Burroughs, who had no personal connection ...

Steely Dan are definitely their own monumental idiosyncratic impossible-to-duplicate entity, but they've also felt important as part of a collective continuum -- a '70s band that reached out to a '50s ...

Steely Dan are one of those bands you either love or hate. To some, they represent the highest peaks of songwriting and studio craft, with lyrical vignettes about lost souls and strange characters ...

I remember the day, in 1977, grabbing the new Steely Dan from the album racks at a lower Manhattan record store: “Aja.” Score! My friends and I — we already had heard the sounds on the radio, lush and ...

When it comes to performances of the best-known jazz-rock album in popular music, it’s next to impossible to imagine anything outdistancing the live version of Steely Dan‘s Aja that thrilled a ...

On its Rent Party Tour, Steely Dan has been playing a handful of its classic albums from start to finish. Led by singer-keyboardist Donald Fagen and guitarist Walter Becker, the jazz-rock band is ...

Over the last several years, artists from Bruce Springsteen to Public Enemy have engaged in the lucrative and crowd-pleasing practice of performing their classic albums in concert, to varying degrees ...

It’s a good thing Steely Dan is a real band, because its story is too improbable for fiction. What are the odds that one of the most popular rock bands of the ‘70s would consist of two antisocial, ...

That said, the second night was by no means a bust. The island breezes wafting through much of “The Royal Scam” made for an inviting escape, especially during “Sign in Stranger” and “Haitian Divorce.” ...

Steely Dan's Aja represented a defining moment in my young musical development; being a jazz-lover and serious student of music (drums/percussion), I had never imagined that a Rock-and-Roll album ...