Donald Fagen of Steely Dan performs at the 43nd Montreux Jazz Festival, in Montreux, Switzerland, on Sat., July 4, 2009.Jean-christophe Bott
Steely Dan At the Molson Amphitheatre in Toronto on Friday
It's the music that counts at a Steely Dan concert. Not the lights, not the pyrotechnics, not the choreography and certainly not the stage-dominating, rooster-in-heat antics of the lead singer.
Indeed, before an enthusiastic crowd of more than 12,000 Friday evening at Molson Amphitheatre, Dan lead singer Donald Fagen spent most of the two-hour gig hunkered behind a pair of sunglasses and a bank of Wurlitzers and Rhodeses. When he did occasionally venture from his perch, usually to cue the band or blow his Hohner melodica, his movements had all the akimbo grace of Pinocchio in his puppet incarnation. Fagen's long-time sidekick, Walter Becker, in the meantime, spent a lot of his time propped by a stool, his electric guitar nestled comfortably atop his ample mid-section.
And why not? Fagen's 63, Becker 61. The days of being major dudes are "gone forever/over a long time ago," to quote from Pretzel Logic, a blues they recorded 36 years ago (and played Friday as an encore). With their pauches and receding, grey hair, relax-fit trousers, sneakers and rolled-up long-sleeve shirts atop black Ts, the guys looked (and seemed to be feeling) very much their age. Let Mick Jagger and Steve Tyler be the monkey men of Dad Rock, these dapper Dans seemed to say. We're going to a backyard barbecue in Etobicoke after this show and we won't even have to change our clothes!
But, as mentioned, no one knowingly goes to a Steely Dan performance for the haberdashery or the visuals. The songs are the thing, and what songs they are! Backed by the cracker-jack eight-piece Miles High Big Band and the all-female Embassy Brats vocal trio, Fagen and Becker - self-described "jazz-rock ambassadors to the galaxy" - dipped into pretty much every facet of their vast and rich repertoire, serving up an 18-tune set distinguished by its muscularity, finesse and chopsmanship.
While the songs hewed pretty closely to their primary melodic and structural contours, they swelled well beyond their original proportions as virtually every musician, including the four-piece horn section, was allowed to make extensive solo statements in addition to keeping the ensemble dialogue happening. Thus, 1973's Dirty Work became a showcase for the shoop-shooping Embassy Brats, as soloists and trio, the outro of Time Out of Mind (from 1980's Gaucho) the opportunity for a spirited exchange of eights between Becker's guitar and Fagen's melodica, Reelin' in the Years a vehicle for some blistering, delirium-inducing fretwork from second axeman Jon Herington.
The Dans are calling their current outing the Shuffle Diplomacy tour - a reference, in part, to shows in some venues where they're playing an album from start to finish (the albums include The Royal Scam, Aja and Gaucho) in addition to a set of songs voted on by fans. While the Toronto date - the only Canadian stop on the tour - didn't partake of that conceit, no one Friday seemed to think he or she was getting anything less than top-grade Dan. Indeed, the concert was distinguished by an almost curatorial-like blend of hits ( Peg, Jose, Kid Charlemagne, Hey 19, Bodhisattva) and relative obscurities like Monkey in Your Soul, the concluding track to the Pretzel Logic LP (with Becker doing the vocals here) and the nasty funk of Godwhacker, from 2003.
If there was an oddity to the evening (besides the cover of Lee Dorsey's Neighbour's Daughter and a funny, extended rap by Becker, in the style of the Grateful Dead's Pigpen, during Hey 19), it was the apparent lack of any material from Two Against Nature. The duo's first studio effort in 20 years, that long-player won an astonishing four Grammys in 2001, including album of the year. Perhaps in neglecting their most-honoured recording Friday, Becker and Fagen were showing they're still the acerbic, gimlet-eyed contrarians we first loved in the 1970s.