In 1975, three of the most exacting songwriters in American music were chasing the same thing without coordinating a single note. Joni Mitchell released The Hissing of Summer Lawns in November of that year, pulling jazz musicians from the L.A. Express and the Crusaders into her orbit and building an album so harmonically dense it baffled the critics who had loved her previous work. Steely Dan, having dissolved their touring band after 1974, were quietly assembling a new model: a studio-only operation with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen at the controls and a rotating cast of the best session players money and reputation could attract. Paul Simon, meanwhile, was recording Still Crazy After All These Years in New York with producer Phil Ramone, hiring players who could hold jazz sophistication and pop clarity in the same breath. The three projects had no common agenda. What they shared was a common address book, and that overlap tells you more about what the mid-1970s were reaching for than almost any other way of telling the story.
The clearest single piece of evidence is Steve Gadd. Released as a single in December 1975, "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" opens with a funky, military-sounding groove that remains Gadd's best-known recording. The drumbeat was originally uniform across the verses and choruses, but Simon and Ramone asked Gadd to rework the verses with a different groove. In between takes, Gadd was quietly practicing drum patterns with particular emphasis on the hi-hat cymbal, and Ramone overheard him and asked him to incorporate those ideas into the final mix. The result was a drum intro that sounded like it had been composed by a military theorist with a jazz education, and it turned a breakup song into a clinic. The track became Paul Simon's only Billboard Hot 100 number one, spending three weeks at the top in early 1976. Two years later, Becker and Fagen came calling. The title track of Aja already had an impressive performance in the verses, but Gadd's drumming across the nearly eight-minute suite is a masterclass in pocket playing, his live tracking done in essentially one pass with the band. The saxophone work in the instrumental break came from Wayne Shorter, best known for his contributions to Miles Davis and Weather Report, overdubbing his solo after Gadd had already laid down his part. The two performances lock together so tightly on the finished record that it sounds like a live conversation, which makes the fact that they were recorded separately all the more remarkable.
Larry Carlton is the other name that runs through all three stories. The musical relationship between Carlton and Joni Mitchell started when she brought in Tom Scott's L.A. Express as a backing band. Carlton had been part of the band since its inception in 1973, and participated in the recording of Court and Spark, her first foray into jazz, released January 17, 1974. A great example of his work on that album is on the single "Help Me," which peaked at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains her only top-ten hit. Carlton is also strongly associated with the studio guitar sounds of Steely Dan. He was one of the players Becker and Fagen turned to as they refined the sound that would run from Katy Lied through Aja. By the time Steely Dan returned with their 1975 album Katy Lied, the credits listed only Fagen and Becker as official members of the group, and that album deepened the practice of employing a rotating cast of session musicians to realize their songs. Carlton was available because Mitchell had already established the template for how to use him.
Mitchell herself was direct about the lineage. She described introducing jazz overtones at a time when nobody was really doing that, and she saw the challenge she posed to other musicians being opened up especially on The Hissing of Summer Lawns and her song "Edith and the Kingpin," claiming those works inspired Steely Dan specifically. "When Steely Dan finally made Aja, with some of the same sidemen, it was applauded as a great, if somewhat eccentric, work," she said. The slight edge in her voice is understandable. The Hissing of Summer Lawns was released November 17, 1975, on Asylum Records, produced by Mitchell herself, recorded at A&M Studios in Hollywood. The album featured Max Bennett, Robben Ford, Victor Feldman, and John Guerin from the L.A. Express, and Larry Carlton, Wilton Felder, and Joe Sample from the Crusaders. After opening with "In France They Kiss on Main Street," the album veers into "The Jungle Line," a Moog-driven piece built on a field recording of the Drummers of Burundi, a move into sampling and multiculturalism that beat the likes of Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and Sting to the punch by a decade. Critics were puzzled. Aja, two years later, arrived with the same jazz-trained players doing broadly similar things, and it won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Mitchell's observation is accurate: the music industry processes risk differently depending on who is taking it.
Paul Simon negotiated his own version of this around the same time, hiring fusion instrumentalists including keyboardist Richard Tee, bassists Tony Levin and Anthony Jackson, and drummer Steve Gadd for albums including One Trick Pony and Hearts and Bones. In the world of jazz fusion and AOR, the cross-pollination was even more direct: albums by Boz Scaggs, Kenny Loggins, and James Taylor in the late 1970s and early 1980s all featured Steely Dan alumni, carrying that smooth, harmonically sophisticated approach into new rooms. The same players kept appearing because the same sonic problem kept presenting itself: how do you make a song that has the harmonic richness of jazz and the immediate emotional clarity of pop, without flattening either one? Nobody solved it perfectly every time. Mitchell on "Edith and the Kingpin," Simon on "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," and Becker and Fagen on the title track of Aja each solved it in ways that still hold up as demonstrations of what the form can do.
The connection between these three artists is not stylistic coincidence or shared geography, though Los Angeles and New York both figure in the story. Both Mitchell and Steely Dan started out as very good folk-based songwriters who got better as they incorporated more jazz elements into their music, and they shared many of the same ace session musicians. Simon arrived at the same destination from a different angle, his ear trained on African and Caribbean rhythm long before Graceland made that explicit. What all three understood was that the session musician, properly chosen, is a co-composer in everything but credit. Gadd's between-takes noodling became the intro to a number-one single. Carlton's guitar phrasing on "Help Me" shaped how listeners heard Mitchell's melodic ideas. The interplay between Gadd and Shorter on "Aja," built across two separate recording sessions, gave an eight-minute track its architecture. These players were hired because Becker and Fagen, Mitchell, and Simon each understood that the right musician in the right room will find something the songwriter could not have written down. That is the real thread connecting these three artists: not genre, not era, not geography, but a shared conviction that the best records are made by people who know when to stop composing and start listening.
