Rosie Vela

"Zazu", or the story of an epiphany and, at the same time, a resurrection. But there's nothing mystical about Roseanne Vela's lush curls - or Rosie, as her friends call her. If anything, the miracle is her beauty, which bursts into the glossy iconography of the 80s like a whirlwind of grace and sensuality. But let's rewind the tape - quite literally, since we're talking about a cassette here, it being 1986 - to reconstruct the first event: the epiphany.

From Vogue to the studio

Rosie Vela's appearance was a thunderbolt even to the eyes of a studio old hand like Gary Katz. Sure, it's hard to imagine that the perfectionist behind the console for Steely Dan would have remained unmoved by the charm of the girl standing in front of him at the A&M Records studios. And yet that girl who'd been introduced to him by the label people, tapes in hand, was no mere cover-girl muse. Born in Galveston, Texas (on December 18, 1952), raised in Red Rock, Arkansas, and relocated to New York back when Rikki wasn't supposed to lose that fateful number, the dazzling top model of deluxe ad campaigns (Revlon, Virginia Slims & co.) - a near-permanent fixture on the cover of Vogue (a full 14 times!) and even glimpsed in Michael Cimino's notorious flop ("Heaven's Gate") - still kept a classic dream tucked away in a drawer, along with a healthy stash of dollar bills earned in those years. She wanted to put her classical piano training to use, setting up her own recording studio and cutting a few demos. And it was precisely those recordings that struck good old Gary like a bolt of lightning - even more than those green eyes and angelic features framed by a tangle of chestnut curls. Because first and foremost, Rosie has a voice of velvet - warm, deeply sensual, but above all perfectly suited to chasing those sinuous, jazzy labyrinths that have always run through the veins of the producer of "Aja". She doesn't need a soul-singer's vocal range: even her seemingly slight, slender voice manages to be tremendously expressive in service of those tracks with their velvet-gloved cadences and jazzy tonalities verging on new cool. Tracks she wrote entirely on her own, no less, revealing an unsuspected passion for the spare ballads of Joni Mitchell, combined with that velvety touch of unmistakable Steely Dan lineage.

There's also a strongly melancholic streak running through her songs, an inevitable trace of a life that hadn't been all roses. A wound still open, hard to heal. During her time in Red Rock, at the University of Arkansas, Vela had in fact met the great love of her life: Jimmy Roberts, a musician in a local band. The two had lived through an intense love story until 1973, when Roberts was diagnosed with cancer. They decided to go ahead and marry as planned, in February 1974, but Jimmy died six months later. It was this episode that pushed her to move to New York and radically change her life: "I decided I had to throw myself into something that moved so fast it would carry me along with it." And that "something" turned out to be a modeling career - more a necessity than a passion, since deep down music had always remained her one true love. That's why she'd decided to invest her money in that handful of songs.

The unexpected rendez-vous

Gary Katz is thrilled: what had looked like a mere commercial job handed to him by the label to indulge the artistic itch of yet another cover-girl diva could turn into a stunning comeback for his most beloved creation. The resurrection, precisely. What he perhaps doesn't yet realize is that this rebirth will happen not only musically but in the flesh, bringing back together the two against nature who hadn't seen each other in six years - not since the release of the last Steely Dan chapter, "Gaucho" (1980). But apparently it all happens by chance, with no planning whatsoever. Because the two men's paths seem to have diverged for good. Becker has moved with his wife to the island of Maui, in the Hawaiian archipelago in the central Pacific, to put his life back together. Fagen, fresh off the massive success of his solo debut, the landmark "The Nightfly" (1982), has grown fascinated with film scores and wanders around New York undecided whether to write new songs or a column for Premiere magazine. Musically, the two have mostly devoted themselves to behind-the-scenes work: Becker produced China Crisis's splendid third studio album, "Flaunt The Imperfection" (1985), pulling off an admirable cold fusion of the Dan method with the new British sophisti-pop; Fagen played keyboards on Rickie Lee Jones's "Pirates". Neither seems inclined to make new records. Least of all to re-form the Steely Dan outfit. And yet fate reshuffles the deck.

One night, while recording at the Village Recorder Studios in Los Angeles, Katz is paid a visit by Walter Becker, who's dropped by simply to see his old friend. The producer plays him those tapes, and the Steely Dan guitarist's eyes widen. He's thrilled to find, in the flowing melodies of Rosie's songs, the intimate essence of the musical experience to which he devoted ten years of his life, full of successes and satisfactions. He merely suggests to Katz that the keyboard sounds could use a bit more body, proposing that he bring in none other than his old friend Donald Fagen. The latter, notoriously prickly as he is, isn't without a heart: the idea of getting back to work for his trusted producer, alongside his longtime musical partner no less, tempts him perhaps even more than the top model from Galveston herself, who beckons like a siren from behind those soft jazz-pop arrangements. The die is cast: Steely Dan will, in effect, reunite. And that rebirth will bear a strange name: "Zazu", meaning "spirit and passion with flair and excitement".

Zazu is actually a female name of Hebrew origin. It means "movement". And in the collective imagination it will end up being associated above all with the funny red-beaked bird from the Disney film "The Lion King". For this writer, though, "Zazu" will remain just one thing: Rosie Vela's record. Which in the year of our lord 1986 finds itself incredibly catapulted into New York's Sound Ideas Studio with the following lineup: Gary Katz at the console, Donald Fagen on keyboards, Walter Becker and Rick Derringer on guitars, Jim Keltner on drums, plus, the cherry on top, Tony Levin, brought in to play bass and Chapman stick on two tracks ("Tonto" and "Zazu"). Better than the front row of a high-fashion runway show.

A magic smile

Could the fruit of such class disappoint? Of course not. But while the all-star team weaves perfectly tailored sonic tapestries (after all, perfection and Steely Dan are practically synonyms), what truly surprises is the sheer grit with which Rosie throws herself into these arrangements - soft yet turbulent at once - starting with the hypnotic opening one-two punch of "Fool's Paradise" and "Magic Smile": as if Fagen's Lester the Nightfly had actually decided to light up that Chesterfield in front of the old turntable, handing the mic for a moment to a female alter ego of his. Vela's ability to inhabit the typically Fagen-esque atmospheres is stunning, on tracks that would have fit more than worthily onto the ex-Steely Dan man's solo masterpiece. Take the aching "Interlude", almost a "Maxine" reborn, cut through by that heart-shattering guitar solo starting at the four-minute mark, before Rosie takes the mic back, swept along by that sinuous swirl of keyboards that is something like the DNA of the whole record. Keyboards that push, wrap around, almost smother the chanteuse from Galveston, who further softens the rough edges with the lower end of her range, while still showing she can climb, quietly, all the way up to the vocal peaks of "Tonto".

These are well-crafted songs, lean and refined at once, suspended between the decade's dominant synth-pop and a jazzy streak that keeps surfacing in the details (the backing vocals, the guitar filigrees, the loping gait dictated by the drumming). Striking episodes follow one another - "Sunday", "Taxi", "Boxs" - interspersed with an unusually wild uptempo number like "2nd Emotion", which reveals new vocal shades in its lead singer, as does the thorny farewell of the title track, which forgoes the catchiness of many earlier tracks in favor of jittery guitar interplay and the obsessive cadences of the drums.

The songs on "Zazu" are mainly love songs – in Vela's own words, "about elusive lovers you never quite catch" – though built with a rather cryptic, enigmatic approach that must also have appealed no end to the Fagen-Becker duo, just like that warm, desaturated cover shot, chosen by the singer herself instead of the glamour photos by Herb Ritts that A&M wanted to use. A sober image, yet one capable of naturally revealing all of Rosie's beauty.

Despite positive reviews and the success of the single "Magic Smile" (No. 29 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart), "Zazu" proved a partial commercial failure in the United States, faring better in Europe, particularly in the UK, where it reached No. 20 on the album chart and earned a silver disc ("Magic Smile" was also a hit in the UK Top 30).

So, gradually, it slipped into oblivion: out of print in America and Europe since the early '90s, the record was however reissued in the UK by Cherry Red in 2011, to mark its 25th anniversary, with a somewhat punchier sound and a booklet containing some behind-the-scenes details about its making along with previously unseen photos. An opportunity to rediscover the full charm of these timeless songs and of the woman who performed them, who in the meantime had dropped completely off the musical radar, save for a few collaborations with Electric Light Orchestra under Jeff Lynne, with whom she also had a seven-year relationship. As for the rumored second chapter credited to Rosie Vela ("Sun Upon The Altar"), announced, recorded but never released by A&M, it will forever remain a mystery.

So all that's left to us is that one, dazzling debut: an epiphany, much like the one this writer experienced upon first hearing it (thanks to the invaluable airwaves of Radio Città Uno), and a resurrection of sorts for two stubbornly unnatural musical partners named Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. Granted, they would later regroup under the Steely Dan banner: in 2000 to record "Two Against Nature", twenty years on from its predecessor, and three years later for "Everything Must Go". A saga that continued afterward on stage too, even after Becker's death in 2017. But, outside of their work for the Dan, the two partners found themselves in the same recording studio on only two other occasions in 44 years: in 1969 for Terry Boylan's album Alias Boona, and in 1973 for Thomas Jefferson Kaye's song "I'll Be Leaving Her Tomorrow". "Zazu" will thus remain, in many ways, a one-off. A celestial vision (on vinyl) of incomparable beauty.

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11/02/2026