That Time Walter and Donald Made a Record With a Supermodel

Here's a song that slips out of its timestamp

The recommendation engines for music keep evolving. They promise encounters with music that’s aligned with a person’s taste but not yet represented in his or her listening history. They serve up the unknown or something that’s just two baby steps removed from the beloved known, all the while tracking which of these “Recommended If You Like….” suggestions are followed and for how long. And, of course, where the listener went next.

So it’s a stalking service, really. A bi-directional one: It finds something and then watches to see if its suggestion was a bullseye or a blip, then scurries back to find more. It moves at speeds far faster than a human can flip through a stack of records, and it’s guided not by intuition but instead by a diabolical sorting and winnowing process based on tagging and metadata and back issues of Crawdaddy and who knows what else. AI at work, enriching lives just the way the scientists said it would!

Still: Better than nothing. This was my thought recently when I fired up YouTube Music to provide automatic DJing while I was working. Like most, my listening and search history covers a wide range of genres and eras, so the instant playlist was all over the map, and, to be honest, somewhat ignorable.

Until this came on….

Cool, distanced voice. Ethereal. All vibe. Moving like a sea-creature, bobbing and slithering through ocean as though nothing, not even the forever chemicals, could slow the forward progress. There’s electric piano shadowing the (through-composed) vocal line. The chord sequence, sly and smart in aquamarine tones, goes places pop songs don’t typically visit.

Took a minute to realize I was hearing something I wrote about when it landed in 1986: Zazu, the debut (and, alas, still only) record from Rosie Vela, which sparkles in part because of the presence of Walter Becker and Donald Fagan. Produced by Gary Katz and released by A&M, this was a pivot for Vela, who was then in the upper echelons of the modeling trade but had ambitions as a singer/songwriter.

Despite radio attention and a few memorable TV appearances (Letterman), Zazu didn’t ignite; in a 1994 interview with the Steely Dan fanzine Metal Leg, guitarist Rick Derringer, who plays on Zazu, laments that Vela’s followup record remains in a vault, a casualty of utterly typical record biz mergers and acquisitions. Derringer describes it as “excellent.”

Lots about Zazu screams the middle 1980s – Vela’s endless hair in glamour-profession closeup on the cover, the processed-sounding drums and glossy synths, the hooks (some potent, some tedious) that aim for some unexplored middle ground between Madonna and the Cure.

“Interlude,” though, slips out of the timestamp. A large part of that is Katz, whose sense of space and proportion helped make Steely Dan records so transparent and therefore magnetic. The big studio successes of that era – Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, heck even ZZ Top – gave off invincibility vibes. They were towering big-rig creations, loaded with sounds. Vela’s songs flourish at more human scale, and Katz seems to exert some discipline over the layering on this one; his production guides listeners through the gently swerving, stretching melody. At least long enough to allow the deliberative mind-rushing-too-fast quality of the lyrics to sink in.

Zazu has an aura, and it’s not the “muso” level of fussy obsession associated with a Steely Dan project – Becker and Fagan are more tactical here, contributing to a deep (but, crucially, not heavy) rhythm section lock. It actually sounds like they’re having fun in the studio, and why not? They’re mixing it up with a crew of A-listers including Derringer, bassist Jimmy Haslip and drummers Jimmy Bralower and Jim Keltner. Even the less engrossing tracks are illuminating  -- they’re examples of the ways great musicians can enhance accompaniment tracks with slight, subtle gestures.

Zazu owns another distinction in Steely Dan lore: Those 1985-86 sessions marked the first time since Gaucho in 1980 that Becker and Fagan worked in a studio together – Becker was not involved in Fagan’s 1982 The Nightfly. It would take more than a decade for the pair to resume their collaboration, on the uneven Two Against Nature (2000).

As for Vela, she did some background vocal work – singing with Joni Mitchell on Don Henley's song "Who Owns This Place?” from the soundtrack to the movie The Color of Money. Vela met Jeff Lynne during the making of the second Traveling Wilburys record and contributed to Electric Light Orchestra’s 2001 album Zoom.

In the comments appended to the YouTube clip for “Interlude” above is one from a user named RosieVela9909. It’s impossible to know if this is her of course, but the same user comments on several other scattered video artifacts from the time of Zazu, noting at one point that she bankrolled a video for the single “Magic Smile” with her own money. Of “Interlude” she writes: “'Interlude' I Love for its Haunted Melody, Kool Chords, Lyrics & Dreams.” Pretty much covers it.