Steely Dan's long-smoldering fascination with the smoky midnight mysteries of le jazz cool and the twisted romantic scenes played out under its influence is raised to the art of concept album on this debut solo LP by Donald Fagen, the group's singer and cowriter. Drawing on his own adolescence for these "fantasies" (as he calls them in a brief liner note), Fagen re-creates the illusion of the hip, big-city jazz DJ, a real gone ghoul ruling the evening airwaves in the late Fifties and early Sixties with a quiet, stylish authority that speaks directly to the imagination of an awkward but hopeful teenager curled up with a radio in his suburban bedroom.

The opening cut, "I.G.Y. (International Geophysical Year)," may sound more like supper-club soul than the passionate jazz of someone like Sonny Rollins. But the shadowy understatement of the muted horns and Fagen's spry turns on a synthesized blues harp heighten the song's naive future gazing ("A just machine to make big decisions/Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision"), at the same time sharpening the slyly disguised cynicism in Fagen's clichéd chorus ("What a beautiful world this will be What a glorious time to be free"). Similarly, the ersatz Latin swing of "New Frontier" is appropriate both to Fagen's droll party-in-a-bomb-shelter imagery and the effervescent desires of the homebound youth, who equates Dave Brubeck's jazzy piano and the wild blond who possesses "a touch of Tuesday Weld" with the spirit of bohemian city life.

That tension between the dull realities of growing up in suburbia during the Eisenhower years and the call of freedom implicit in jazz informs much of this album. The furtive rush of an interracial uptown romance is set to a subway disco gallop in "Green Flower Street" (no doubt a bow to the jazz standard "On Green Dolphin Street"). And "Maxine" finds a couple making big plans amid the cold, dark anonymity of a shopping mall to the accompaniment of a tinkling cafe piano and Fagen's overdubbed impersonation of the jazz vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.

The Nightfly is not without flaws. As an application of cool style to a trite pop song, Fagen's cover of Leiber-Stoller's "Ruby Baby" is merely clever filler. And the immaculate playing and calculated production run counter to the spontaneity and raw emotion expressed in the best jazz. But this album is about dreams, and with his glib words and liquid tunes, Donald Fagen conjures a world where all things are possible, even to a kid locked in his bedroom. (RS 383)

DAVID FRICKE