Word: gaucho
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...Gaucho, its newest release, is typical Steely Dan. It sports a hit single, and Becker and Fagen once again play bass and sing, and co-write all the songs. The "finest studio musicians around," including Dire Straits' guitarist Mark Knopfler and veteran hornmen the Brecker Brothers, Tom Scott and David Sanborn again make appearances. Steely Dan isn't a band, it's a conglomerate. On one cut, sixteen musicians are listed. The result, which lacks the breadth of most big band music, sounds neither spontaneous nor energetic...
...predictability is irritating as the band crafts each record and each song to sound slightly different than the last: Royal Scam ushered in horn sections; Aja added extended orchestration. Some call Gaucho the quintessential Steely Dan. It "took three years to make," the ads brag. The ads don't mention the contract dispute and auto accident that actually delayed the album. You're supposed to think Dan put more thought into Gaucho than the albums it churned out annually. Not so. When Becker and Fagen assemble an album, it's like a political party picking a presidential candidate: the question...
Steely Dan: Gaucho (MCA). Arcane Southern California folkways and unsprung rhythms...
Back at the house Reagan talked about the high country. Western landscapes filled the rooms, a huge gaucho hat hung on a rack, a saddle sat by the wall. "This place has a spell," he said, "and people feel it when they come here...
Borges includes a few of his gaucho stories: spare, Kiplingesque tales of hard drinking and knife fights in provincial Argentina, where, he says, there is no small town "that isn't exactly like all the others - even to the point of thinking itself different." Such stories of pure action follow a ritual and rhythm - like simple milongas and tangos - that allow the author to dance briefly from the library stacks where he has spent most of his years. And where he truly belongs. For it is from the life of books that he discovered how to fit elegantly rigged...