Well, this has been a long time coming, and no mistake. It’s nearly 40 years since the original Nightfly spun his tales from the foot of Mt Belzoni.
Sometimes people ask if there is such a thing as the perfect album. Well, for my money, The Nightfly is one such special and precious thing. So a live recording has some ridiculously high standards to live up to.
But as I sit listening to this, for the first time since it arrived, I am not disappointed. My first complete listen is in the car driving to work today. I’m now listening on headphones, at days’ end. Much better!Becker and Fagen were infamous studio perfectionists. It’s quite possibly thanks to the surviving legacy of such rigorously high standards that this stood any chance of success at all.
But then, of course, there is the material. With songs as well put together as these – each one is literally a perfect work of musical art – and a crack team of musicians, who are up to the job of paying such masterpieces their due respect, well… to alter a famous phrase, they were, perhaps, doomed to succeed!?
As a drummer, one of the first things that struck me was how busy and ‘pretty’ some of Keith Carlock’s playing is. In particular his left hand ghost or grace notes on the snare drum. I thought, for a brief moment, uh-oh, he’s overdoing it. Some may feel he is? But as I heard more and more, and finally the whole thing, I grew less inclined to nitpick.
The Dan were notably hard on drummers, ultimately creating Wendel, and for The Nightfly Wendel II, as a way to make drum parts more precise. Carlock is metronomically tight (how much post-production quantising is involved here, I don’t know?), and pretty much everything he adds manages not to get in the way of the feel of the tracks as we know and love them, but rather to add a bit of snap, crackle, pop and fizz to things. Impressive!
Then there’s the duality of structure vs improv’, and how to handle that. I think these redoubtable folk get the balance just right. The songs all sound faithful to the originals in most significant and structural respects, with just a little wiggle room for improv, and variety. There are occasional tweaks of vocal melody by Don, some ‘live show’ variant endings (e.g. Green Flower Street), and even a little stretching out here and there.
Fabulously it remains in that honey-pot sweet spot, the much vaunted ‘Goldilocks zone’, of neither too little nor too much, but just the right amount!
Listening a second time it’s all so incredibly clean, precise and beautifully mixed and balanced, one can’t help but wonder how much modern tech has helped play a hand in realising such a stunning outcome. But to be honest, I frankly couldn’t care less! Because sometimes the ends justify the means. And here is a case in point.
The recordings are from 2019, and are performed by The Steely Dan Band, as the post-Walter Becker group is known. recorded at the Orpheus (Boston, MA) and Beacon (NYC) Theatres. Personnel is as follows:
Donald Fagen, vocals, keys, melodica
Jim Beard, keys
Jon Herrington, Connor Kennedy, guitar
Freddie Washington, bass
Keith Carlock, drums
Michael Leonhart, trumpet
Walt Weiskopf, sax
Jim Pugh, trombone
Carolyn Leonhart, Catherine Russell, Jamie Leonhart, LaTanya Hall, b-vocals
All things considered, this is ace! An essential addition to the Dan/Fagen catalogue.