After reading the news of Sonny Rollins’s death this week at age 95, I took a look back at what Walter Becker and Donald Fagen said over the years about the Saxophone Colossus. Journalists trying to figure out Steely Dan’s secret sauce regularly asked Becker and Fagen about their primary influences, and they almost always mentioned Rollins in the company of Bird, Duke, Miles, Mingus, and Monk.
“Walter and I started with the idea that freedom was a given because our heroes were Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins,” Fagen told The Telegraph in 2006. When I asked Fagen three years ago about the albums he has listened to most often, his answer included, “All Sonny’s stuff through The Bridge”—nearly 20 albums over a wildly inventive 10-year stretch.
It can be tempting to see Rollins’s music as a “Rosebud”-like key to understanding Fagen’s inner life. On the cover of his debut solo album, The Nightfly, Fagen poses as the kind of after-hours jazz disc jockey he heard on the radio as a kid in the New Jersey suburbs, and the record he’s spinning is none other than Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders from 1959.
Around the age of 12, Fagen began taking the bus into Manhattan to attend shows at jazz clubs. “At the Village Vanguard, my distress at being the youngest person in the audience would dissolve as soon as the music started,” he wrote in his memoir, Eminent Hipsters. “In the early ’60s, gods stood on that tiny stage. A lot of them drank J&B and smoked Luckies, but they were gods just the same. Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane were still youngish, fearless, and working at the summit of their creativity.”
In the December 18, 1993, issue of Melody Maker, Fagen was asked to share some of the records he deemed essential. Among his dozen selections was a tune off of Rollins’s The Bridge. The list was first republished in a 1994 issue of Metal Leg, the original Steely Dan fanzine. Now, with this mixtape, you can listen to all of Fagen’s picks while reading his commentary below.
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