Ed Motta is still learning from Steely Dan
The Brazilian AOR maestro shares the teachings of Becker and Fagen.
When the Brazilian singer-songwriter Ed Motta appears on the video conference screen from his home in Rio de Janeiro, he’s wearing a Gaucho T-shirt. It’s the same one he sports in a photo in which he’s standing among the towering shelves that contain his massive record collection, holding two copies of Steely Dan’s 1980 masterwork.
It so happens that Motta has done a series of these shots, posing in shirts matching the covers of Can’t Buy a Thrill and Countdown to Ecstasy and Pretzel Logic—and other beloved non-Dan albums, too. In the Aja variation, he’s holding a half-dozen copies of the landmark 1977 album. Motta admits to accumulating different pressings of the record as if they were passport stamps, buying them in every country he visits on tour. “Even Eastern European ones with horrible sound,” he says with a laugh. “It doesn’t matter.”
Motta is no mere Steely Dan fanboy. An accomplished recording artist in his own right, he stands today as one of the great beneficiaries and global ambassadors of the Becker-Fagen songbook. The nephew of the late, larger-than-life Brazilian singer Tim Maia, young Ed proved to be a musical whiz kid, releasing his first album at the age of 15. Now 52, he still considers himself a student, particularly when it comes to the lessons on composition and recording he continues to glean from Steely Dan’s catalog. Motta has spent much of his career studying his jazz-rock forebears, melding those influences with South American musical traditions, American funk and R&B rhythms, and the orchestral works of 20th century Hollywood and Broadway composers to create a sound that is at once warmly familiar and entirely his own.
A decade ago, Motta’s preoccupation with the studio craftsmen of 1970s Los Angeles reached something of apex on his album AOR. (On the cover, Motta wears a floral-print shirt under a white suit jacket; he looks like a South American drug lord destined to be capped Sonny Crockett at the end of a two-part Miami Vice episode.) The record is an appropriately lush homage to Steely Dan, Michael Franks, Gino Vannelli, the precise productions of Jay Graydon, and other things he heard on the radio as a boy. He followed up with Perpetual Gateways (2016) and Criterion of the Senses (2018), on which he explores similar territory with equally fruitful results.
When Motta and I spoke late last year, he was preparing to record his 14th studio album. The result is the elegant Behind the Tea Chronicles, released on October 20, which displays Motta’s command of every facet of his craft, down to the atomic level of each chord voicing. With Fagenesque flair, he spins tales of mobsters and businessmen, singers and spacemen, interweaving allusions to cinema, television, and science fiction. It’s an album on which a song called “Gaslighting Nancy,” incredibly, is not the one most indebted to Steely Dan; that would be the Purdie-shuffling “Shot in the Park”—what Motta, in his track notes, plainly calls “a love letter to Donald Fagen and Steely Dan.”
Speaking of Bernard Purdie, Motta once cooked dinner for the legendary drummer while they were recording together at Fagen’s River Sound Studios. We talked about why that album—which also features Steely Dan mainstays Chuck Rainey and Paul Griffin—has never been released, his surprise encounter with Fagen, the best-sounding version of Aja, and much more.