“My Old School” is a single drawn from Steely Dan’s 1973 album Countdown to Ecstasy. It reached number 63 on the Billboard Hot 100.[1] The song’s lyrics tell the story of a May 1969 drug bust at Bard College, referred to in the lyrics by its location, Annandale. The incident happened while both Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were students there, and the song mentions how a female acquaintance had betrayed them to “Daddy Gee” (G. Gordon Liddy), then the local prosecutor. According to a 2014 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, 44 people were arrested, including Fagen, whose long hair was cut off at the Poughkeepsie jail.[2] The upshot in the song is that the singer vows he is “never going back” to the college until “California tumbles into the sea”.[3] Cash Box described the song as a “departure from the group’s usual fare, but definitely a track that’s going to have programmers and listeners buzzing.” The song was written by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker[5] and is in the key of G major. The original studio track features a guitar solo by Jeff Baxter. Donald Fagen – piano, lead vocals, backup vocals Walter Becker – bass Denny Dias – rhythm guitar Jeff Baxter – lead guitar Jim Hodder – drums, percussion Sherlie Matthews, Myrna Matthews, Patricia Hall, Royce Jones – backup vocals Ernie Watts – saxophone Johnny Rotella – saxophone Lanny Morgan – saxophone Bill Perkins – saxophone Fagen went back on his “never going back” promise. He returned to Bard College when he received an honorary Doctor of the Arts degree in 1985.

While all of this has been a fantastic experience, it has left out kids who attend schools in underprivileged, more diverse communities without funding for modern music education. Schools and districts in these areas lack funding for the equipment, teachers, curriculum, and support necessary to facilitate rock-band-style programs like the ones I’ve created.

My mission was to tackle this head-on and bring these exceptional programs to students in economically challenged areas, so I sold my music schools and am launching The Van Tuyl Music Foundation to forever change music education. Our foundation will directly provide the funding for the equipment, instruction, curriculum, and support necessary to facilitate these programs.

Ryan Van Tuyl

Aja (pronounced like Asia) is the sixth studio album by the American jazz rock band Steely Dan. It was released on September 23, 1977, by ABC Records. Recording alongside nearly 40 musicians, band leaders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker pushed Steely Dan further into experimenting with different combinations of session players while pursuing longer, more sophisticated compositions for the album. The album peaked at number three on the US charts and number five in the UK, ultimately becoming Steely Dan’s most commercially successful LP. It spawned a number of hit singles, including “Peg”, “Deacon Blues”, and “Josie”. In July 1978, Aja won the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical and received Grammy nominations for Album of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. It has since appeared frequently on professional rankings of the greatest albums, with critics and audiophiles applauding the album’s high production standards. In 2010, the Library of Congress selected the album for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or artistically significant.”

While all of this has been a fantastic experience, it has left out kids who attend schools in underprivileged, more diverse communities without funding for modern music education. Schools and districts in these areas lack funding for the equipment, teachers, curriculum, and support necessary to facilitate rock-band-style programs like the ones I’ve created.

My mission was to tackle this head-on and bring these exceptional programs to students in economically challenged areas, so I sold my music schools and am launching The Van Tuyl Music Foundation to forever change music education. Our foundation will directly provide the funding for the equipment, instruction, curriculum, and support necessary to facilitate these programs.

Ryan Van Tuyl

“Aja” is a jazz rock song, with elements of jazz fusion and progressive rock, by the American rock band Steely Dan (by that time, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen) from the album of the same name, their sixth studio album, released in 1977. Composers Becker and Fagen play guitar and synthesizer, respectively, on the song, with various studio musicians playing the other parts; Fagen sings lead vocals. Production duties were handled by Gary Katz; the album was released through ABC Records. Musically, it is a tonally sophisticated and structurally complex work that was praised on its release as the most ambitious track the duo had ever attempted. The song’s lyrics center around the interior monologue of a man who runs to the title character to escape the stresses of his life “up on the hill.” Fagen claimed that it was inspired by a relative of someone he knew, who had married a Korean woman named Aja. He has described the song as being about the “tranquility that can come of a quiet relationship with a beautiful woman.” By the time Becker and Fagen began writing and recording the sixth Steely Dan album, Aja, in 1977, the two felt comfortable enough to focus on their songwriting. “We were feeling really lucky that year,” Becker said in the 1999 Classic Albums documentary on the album, “and wanted to try something longer.” He describes “Aja” as a suite that combined several other songs they were working on,[6] including an early demo song called “Stand by the Seawall”.

Hi, my name is Ryan Van Tuyl, and since 2004 I’ve helped thousands of kids learn piano, singing, guitar, bass, drums, and songwriting in schools all over the world. The programs I’ve created teach kids how to achieve their musical dreams and become better, hardworking individuals through learning to play and perform rock, pop, hip-hop, blues, metal, and jazz music. Graduates of my programs have attended prestigious music colleges and universities. However, these programs have only been able to exist in middle-to-upper-class communities, where parents can afford to fund music education for their children directly.

While all of this has been a fantastic experience, it has left out kids who attend schools in underprivileged, more diverse communities without funding for modern music education. Schools and districts in these areas lack funding for the equipment, teachers, curriculum, and support necessary to facilitate rock-band-style programs like the ones I’ve created.

My mission was to tackle this head-on and bring these exceptional programs to students in economically challenged areas, so I sold my music schools and am launching The Van Tuyl Music Foundation to forever change music education. Our foundation will directly provide the funding for the equipment, instruction, curriculum, and support necessary to facilitate these programs.

Ryan Van Tuyl