In my recent interview with Donald Fagen, I couldn’t resist asking him about “fake jazz.”
He had famously employed the term in the 1999 Classic Albums documentary on Aja, while describing his eclectic constellation of influences. “I was interested in TV music, movie soundtracks. I could sometimes tell who wrote the score just from hearing the music, whether it was Elmer Bernstein or Dave Grusin or Alex North or whoever,” Fagen said. “There was something also funny about that music. There was something funny about the theme from The Twilight Zone. Something funny about the jazz score to Sweet Smell of Success. Because it was like fake jazz, essentially. So I both liked real jazz and also fake jazz and also fake fake jazz.”
Certainly one way to think about the music of Steely Dan is as a well-forged alloy of those three elements: pure Ellingtonian jazz, jazzy film and television scores, and a curious sort of self-aware ersatz jazz.
In a 1995 interview with Mojo magazine, Fagen attempted to explain the role fake jazz had played in his songwriting partnership with Walter Becker:
We were interested in a kind of hybrid music that included all the music we’d ever listened to. So there was always a lot of TV music and things in there. It was very eclectic, and it used to make us laugh: we knew something was good if we would really laugh at it when we played it back. We liked the sort of faux-luxe sound of the ’50s. There was just something very funny about it. I grew up in a faux-luxe household, and it was a very alienating world, so for me it has the opposite effect: muzak is supposed to relax you, but it makes me very anxious. So in a way, I think I get it out of me by putting some of it in my songs. Then I start to laugh at it when I hear it.
One could also point to the tongue-in-cheek title of Steely Dan’s 2000 concert video, Plush TV Jazz-Rock Party. Or the decidedly faux-luxe terms Becker once used to describe the appeal of a well-appointed recording studio: “It’s about that space-age bachelor-pad vibe.”
When I asked Fagen to recommend some of his favorite fake jazz, the maestro name-checked Henry Mancini, above all, in addition to Leonard Bernstein, Kenyon Hopkins, Elmer Bernstein, Nelson Riddle, Bernard Herrmann, and Lalo Schifrin.
In this episode of the Expanding Dan podcast, we dip a toe into the vast ocean of fake jazz, beginning with the work of those great midcentury composers.
