Jazz is everywhere in rock music, if you know where to listen. It is in the chord changes that no blues musician would have written, the solos that follow harmonic rather than pentatonic logic, the extended structures that function as suites rather than songs. The tracks on this list made the borrowing explicit, absorbing jazz’s vocabulary into rock contexts and producing something neither genre had previously contained or claimed.
#1: Deacon Blues — Steely Dan (1977)
Becker and Fagen built this seven-minute album track entirely on jazz harmony and hired jazz saxophonist Pete Christlieb for a solo that defines the entire piece. The chord changes move through extensions and substitutions no blues-rooted musician would have arrived at naturally. It is a rock song in format and a jazz composition in everything else, which is the most accurate description of what Steely Dan actually were.
