Steely Dan's sixth album, Aja, released September 23, 1977, on ABC Records, was built by a band that did not exist. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had dissolved Steely Dan as a touring and recording unit years earlier, leaving themselves as a songwriting partnership with a production budget and a phone book full of the best session players in Los Angeles. What they assembled for Aja was not a band but a rotating cast of roughly thirty musicians across seven tracks, each one hired to solve a specific sonic problem. The result was one of the most precisely engineered albums of the 1970s, and the drum chair alone tells the whole story.
Producer Gary Katz, who had worked with Becker and Fagen since their debut, oversaw sessions that ran from late 1976 through July 1977 across six studios in Los Angeles and New York, including Village Recorder and Producer's Workshop in Hollywood. The approach was methodical to the point of obsession. Becker and Fagen would audition players, record takes, and discard anything that did not meet their standard. For the drums, they did not settle on one player. They hired a different drummer for nearly every track.
Paul Humphrey played on "Black Cow," the album opener, whose bright bass-and-keys groove sets the tone before the song reveals itself as a kiss-off to a self-destructing lover. Steve Gadd took the title track, an eight-minute jazz suite that became one of the most studied drum performances in the genre's history. Bernard Purdie, whose "Purdie shuffle" had become a foundational groove in R&B, played on "Deacon Blues" and "Home at Last." Rick Marotta handled "Peg." Ed Greene played on "I Got the News." Jim Keltner closed the album on "Josie." Six drummers, seven songs. The rotating chair was a feature, not a bug. Becker and Fagen wanted the feel of each track to be native to its player, not imposed by a single stylistic hand.
The rest of the personnel reads the same way. Chuck Rainey anchored the bass on most tracks, providing the one consistent rhythmic thread. Larry Carlton played guitar across multiple songs, including the title track and "Deacon Blues." Jay Graydon landed the guitar solo on "Peg" after Becker and Fagen reportedly worked through a long series of rejected takes before Graydon's version satisfied them. Steve Khan, Lee Ritenour, and Denny Dias also contributed guitar on various tracks. The keyboard chair was similarly distributed among Victor Feldman, Paul Griffin, Joe Sample, Don Grolnick, and Michael Omartian.
The guest appearances are where Aja earns its reputation as a jazz record wearing pop clothes. Wayne Shorter, the tenor saxophonist whose work with Miles Davis had made him one of the most influential voices in jazz, played the saxophone solo on the title track. Pete Christlieb, then a member of the Tonight Show Orchestra, played the tenor saxophone solo on "Deacon Blues," a seven-minute meditation on artistic failure and romantic self-destruction that became one of the album's most enduring tracks. Michael McDonald, whose voice had become one of the most recognizable in Los Angeles session circles, sang backing vocals on "Peg," giving the track its distinctive harmonic warmth. Tim Schmit contributed backing vocals on the title track, "Home at Last," and "Josie."
"Peg" was released as the first single in November 1977 and climbed to number 11 on the US Billboard Hot 100. "Deacon Blues" followed in March 1978, reaching number 19. "Josie" came third in August 1978, peaking at number 26. The album itself peaked at number 3 on the US Billboard chart, making it Steely Dan's highest-charting record in America, and number 5 in the UK. It was the band's first platinum album and eventually sold over five million copies. Those numbers are significant because Aja never hit number 1. It was a record that accumulated rather than exploded, building through FM radio play of all seven tracks and sustained word of mouth about its sound quality.
That sound quality earned its own Grammy. At the 20th Annual Grammy Awards in 1978, Aja won Best Engineered Non-Classical Recording, with the award going to engineers Roger Nichols, Al Schmitt, Elliot Scheiner, and Bill Schnee. The album was also nominated for Album of the Year. In 2003 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2010 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry, citing its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.
What Becker and Fagen understood, and what the rotating-musician approach made possible, was that perfection in the studio is not about consistency of personnel. It is about matching the right player to the right moment. Steve Gadd's explosive fills on the title track would have been wrong on "Black Cow." Pete Christlieb's tenor solo on "Deacon Blues" lands because it sounds like it comes from a different world than the rest of the arrangement, which is exactly the point of the lyric. The album's seven tracks are seven separate arguments for the same idea: that craft, applied with enough patience and enough phone calls, can sound like inspiration.
