“Aja” by Steely Dan

"Aja", the eight-minute title track of Steely Dan's sixth album, released by ABC in 1977, is where Walter Becker and Donald Fagen stopped pretending they were a rock band. Gary Katz produced, Fagen sings and plays synthesizer, Becker plays guitar, and a crack session crew does the rest: Chuck Rainey on bass, Joe Sample on Rhodes, Victor Feldman on percussion. Fagen's words drift through the mind of a man running from the pressures of his life into the calm of the woman named in the title.

The rhythm track took less than a day. Denny Dias's solo was the last time another founding member played on a Steely Dan record, while Wayne Shorter's tenor saxophone and Steve Gadd's drums made their debuts. Gadd's break, the band's first drum solo, took just 2 takes, and jazz fusion rarely sounded so cool.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.