Greg Stepanich

Nearly Dan: How fans create a living music

I'm going to shamelessly piggyback on a nifty column in the Financial Times last weekend by arts writer Peter Aspden, who tells about how he went somewhat reluctantly to a concert in North London by a Steely Dan tribute band called Nearly Dan (that's a great name, too).

Aspden writes that before going to the concert he'd thought there'd be nothing sadder than hearing a tribute band of any kind, defined as a bunch of folks in their 40s playing the music of their childhood heroes for another group of people in their 40s:

This is surely the apotheosis of an ersatz, derivative, uninspired culture that has given up all pretensions to originality and is happy to bask in a hazy mix of beer and approximation. Rock music was never meant to descend to these levels of pathos.

But Aspden went to the gig, and loved it, finding the band not only good, but devoted to the music and therefore passionate and persuasive.

So I wandered over to Nearly Dan's site, which tells us the 10-piece British band has been around since 1997, and it sounds like they're still working it pretty hard in the U.K. club circuit. But you can hear some clips from recent live performances, including songs such as Deacon Blues and Cousin Dupree, and it's decent. It's not as tight as Steely Dan was in the one recent TV performance I saw, but these faux-Dan clips have heart.

It should be noted here that the music of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker is about as sophisticated a body of popular music as you're ever likely to find. It's essentially jazz, but unlike much contemporary jazz it has a superior melodic sense. The lyrics are urbane and utterly adult, and it seems clear to me a certain number of these songs is likely to outlast a good deal of other pop music, which goes some way toward explaining the attachment of Nearly Dan to the oeuvre of Fagen and Becker.

What they're doing by performing these songs is the same thing that classical musicians do, in that they take an established literature and bring it back to life. This band reveres this music, and because they do, their playing is infused with the highest respect (one of the FAQs on the Nearly Dan site explains that they painstakingly pick the brass parts off the records with a piano and run them through a sequencer, after which a computer notates it).

It's love that creates a living music, be it a choir performing a motet by Lassus or a band of fans working their way through Peg. There's no higher tribute than that to the power of music to move us no matter how long ago, or how recently, it was written.

A somber anniversary: Today is the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the day our family lost one of our members in the World Trade Center. Let me take this moment to salute the memory of my cousin, Jimmy Geyer, and say on behalf of all of us that we still miss him all these years later.