Aja

Seven tracks in about forty minutes, and inside each the subtractive test finds almost nothing loose: the method was to cut every part that did not serve, take after take, player after player, and the arrangements show it. The bass, guitar and horn parts of Peg are as lean as a pop arrangement can be and still carry its harmony. The title track’s length is compelled: its verse, its instrumental passage, Shorter’s solo and Gadd’s drumming over the closing vamp are the escape the song describes, taken at the length escape requires. Deacon Blues needs its seven and a half minutes to make a dream feel like a life. The test bites once, on I Got the News, a busy funk of obscure innuendo whose loss the sequence would scarcely feel; Black Cow’s outro runs a little past its argument.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: in the affluent America of the late 1970s, longing has been taken over by style, so that the dream of another life, the jazzman’s, the lover’s in the East, the woman on the screen, is held as a polished surface over defeat. Deacon Blues states it most fully: a suburban man fantasises the night musician’s romance, wants to “work the saxophone” and die drunk at the wheel, and asks for a name for losing as the winners have theirs. The sound discloses as much as the words, and is credited fully: the immaculate surface is the culture it describes. The irony holds the figure: the songs observe more than they articulate, and Black Cow, Peg and I Got the News give a knowing mood more than a meaning.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Elevation is real, of one cool kind. The title track is the summit: after the hushed verses the music opens into an instrumental landscape, Wayne Shorter’s tenor solo enters, and Steve Gadd’s drumming builds over the closing vamp into a climax of a kind pop records seldom attempt, transport held in perfect control. Deacon Blues rises at each chorus into a wide, sad swell, and the horns and Pete Christlieb’s solo give its fantasy a height the man never reaches. Home at Last lifts on Bernard Purdie’s shuffle into a buoyant, weary grandeur; Peg has a bright lift. Black Cow is lustrous but level, I Got the News has energy without height, and Josie is a strut. The height is poise, never terror, and its one great peak is a single track.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Myth is built once and evoked elsewhere. Home at Last builds the Odyssey as its frame: the speaker is Ulysses “tied to the mast”, the sirens and their shore are a woman and a life on offer, and the homecoming is a withdrawal from them. The archetype bears the song’s weight, and the particular stays particular. Deacon Blues builds a modern figure close to myth, the self-made outlaw who chooses defeat and wants a name for it as the culture names its winners. Aja evokes the refuge in the East; Josie the wild girl’s return to her neighbourhood, half festival and half threat; Peg the woman who exists as an image. What holds the axis well below the rest is that these are summoned by a sentence or a title, inside an irony that keeps them from bearing weight.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The inheritance is the band’s own: five albums on which a rock group had already become a studio partnership using session players and jazz harmony, with The Royal Scam (1976) the step before; beside it, jazz-rock fusion and the polished soul and pop of the Los Angeles studios. The turn is one of degree and of one track. The record carries extended and altered chords further into the popular song than any rock record of its standing, and in the title track builds a through-composed piece of about eight minutes around a jazz master’s solo and a drummer’s climax, inside a record meant to sell. The stake was real in labour and cost, a year of sessions with whole bands of players tried and discarded, but small commercially. It perfects a swerve made earlier.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because the knowledge is in the relation between surface and subject. Built as it is, every chord placed and every horn line burnished, Deacon Blues becomes a song about a man for whom even failure is an aesthetic, and the sound is the dream he lives inside. The title track opens into a long instrumental passage and does not return to its opening as a pop song would: the form is the escape it describes. The sequence is counted here, once: side one runs from a lover lost to a refuge to a self-mythologising loser; side two, opened by the bright artifice of Peg, turns on two returns. The arc is loose, and Peg and I Got the News are contained rather than enacted.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence over forty-nine years, more formal than semantic. Musicians have studied the record continuously: its chord voicings, its guitar and saxophone solos, Purdie’s shuffle on Home at Last and Gadd’s drumming on the title track are transcribed and taught as models of their kinds. It has long served engineers and the makers of audio equipment as a reference, a use that has kept it under close listening, and the account of its making, players tried and discarded until the part was right, has become part of how it is heard. The semantic yield is real but narrower. Deacon Blues and Home at Last reopen with age, the irony of the first and the weariness of the second reading differently at forty than at twenty; Black Cow, Peg and I Got the News give little more than at first hearing.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The field is the rock and pop album of the late 1970s. The intrinsic force is a refinement more than a reorganisation: the record showed that jazz harmony, jazz soloists and the full resources of the session studio could be the substance of a popular record that sold in the millions, and it set a standard of finish others measured themselves against. Its means were not new: fusion and the Los Angeles studio sound were established, and the band’s own earlier records had done most of the turning. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a benchmark of studio craft and recorded sound for the decade after; Peg sampled in De La Soul’s Eye Know (1989), so that the record passed into hip hop; and a harmonic language studied and borrowed by later pop, jazz-pop and R&B musicians.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, unaltered in sequence, in print throughout and remastered. Presence is continuous and wide: Peg, Deacon Blues and Josie have stayed in broadcast for four decades, and the album is heard whole and not only through its singles. Part of that presence is narrower in kind, among musicians, engineers and the audiophile trade, and part of its later currency came through a retrospective fashion for the polished soft rock of its years, which is charged. The fabric is the record’s strength: acoustic and electric instruments recorded with great fidelity, almost no synthesiser, nothing that dates as the drum machines of a few years later would, though the sheen is plainly of its place and decade. It stands level with Low, of the same year.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The making is load-bearing throughout, and it is the record’s first fact. The arrangements are exact: every part placed and voiced so that dense harmony stays clear, the horn charts of Deacon Blues and Home at Last as finished as any in pop. The players are used as an orchestrator uses instruments: Purdie’s shuffle is the gait of Home at Last, Gadd’s drumming the architecture of the title track’s close, Shorter’s solo placed as the summit of the piece and not as decoration. The recorded sound is of the highest command for its time, each instrument present, the low end firm, the whole spacious and unforced. The costs are narrow: Fagen’s voice is a limited instrument, I Got the News is busy rather than built, and a polish with no roughness at times flattens the contrast between songs.

Score: 9.0 / 10

One law governs the record: a flawless surface laid over lives that are failing, held in a cool, ironic voice that never quite judges. The two most distant elements obey it. The title track is an eight-minute jazz composition with a saxophone solo and a drum climax; Josie is a guitar-driven strut of four and a half minutes about a girl coming back to the block. Both are made to the same finish, both are about a place one goes to escape, and both are sung by the same knowing observer. Deacon Blues, the most personal song, and Peg, the most artificial, obey it too. The range of form runs from jazz ballad to funk to pop single, but the palette is largely one palette, and I Got the News follows the law in sound more than in substance.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully in Deacon Blues, the inner life of a man who scripts his own defeat. The couple is held in Black Cow, a lover leaving, in the refuge of Aja, and in the woman of Peg, who exists as a photograph. Class and the suburb are held in Deacon Blues’s escape from them; the entertainment industry and the image in Peg; the neighbourhood and its loyalties in Josie; drink, drugs and the death at the wheel; and the inherited myth of homecoming in Home at Last. One ironic voice joins them. What holds the figure lowest: most orders appear in single songs and single images, and the family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent or only implied.

Score: 7.2 / 10