“The Annex Sessions” Wednesday, May 29, 2024, 6-8:30pm will continue our music series held at El Cerrito Natural Grocery Company Prepared Food Annex (The Annex)
The Dans of Steel
Waddell Bell – bass, vocals
Ronnie Smith – drums, vocals
Raliegh Neal – keyboards, vocals
Bill Hampton – Guitar
Make tonight a wonderful thing with The Dans of Steel…
Bay Area based band The Dans of Steel celebrates the music of Steely Dan, the prolific American rock band founded in 1972 by masterminds Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.
Started in 2017, it’s a deserving tribute from five deeply soulful musicians who came together in admiration of the detailed craftings and artistic splendor of Steely Dan.
The Dans of Steel — Waddell Bell, Ronnie Smith, Bill Hampton and Raliegh Neal — explore, “funkafy” and lovingly recreate songs from throughout the Steely Dan canon that brings together jazz, rock, and r&b sensibilities.
As seasoned musicians, they look to the actual session players that enrich each album Steely Dan has produced.
The Dans, all of them fathers (and at times Men of Steel in their everyday lives), enjoy heated conversations and long listening sessions together. Having a reverence for Steely Dan’s body of work, they often go deep into the large list of supporting musicians who lend their talents to creating the music’s aesthetic, including the individual guitarists, bassist, drummers, pianists and vocalists.
The band aims to go beyond just Donald Fagen and Walter Becker by reaching in the bag of the often-unsung session musicians, whose skills created the groves, riffs, vibes and arrangements that still thrill us today. Members of bands like The Crusaders, The Doobie Brothers, Toto, Weather Report and so many others.
The music and compositions of the support musicians can be related back to the Steely Dan discography and in turn we begin to see how truly prolific this music was and still is.
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The Natural Grocery Company is proud to present this series in partnership with SunJams and Javier Navarrette Music.
SunJams is committed to funding children’s music education in underserved public elementary schools. Your donation will help support this ongoing program.
All of the proceeds will go directly to our network of local musicians, each of whom have been severely impacted by the lack of events during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whether you donate $10, $100, or $1000 – any amount helps and will allow us to keep bringing music to our community! As always, your donation to SunJams 501(c)3 may qualify as tax exempt.
Javier Navarrette Music continues to bring live music to several venues around the Bay Area. Javier has been a professional musician and music educator in the Oakland Unified School District for the past 20 years. Over the past few years Navarrette has produced outdoors events that have proven instrumental in enabling musicians to deal with some of the fallout of the pandemic and shutdown that followed.
COVID RELATED SAFETY MEASURES
Please be safe. Feel free to wear a mask if you prefer.
TICKETS
Tickets are NOT required for this venue, you can simply come in, order food and beverages at the Annex counter and pay at the registers.