You might enjoy this 16-minute video.
I never heard of Parker's Band before. Cool chart.
There were so many excellent, remarkable bands and musicians in the '60s, '70s, and 80s. I love so many of them. For example, I think some of the work of Olivia Newton John is absolutely fantastic. Also the Bee Gees, although I didn't think that much of them at the time, have grown on me. Their collaboration with Barbra Streisand, Guilty, is I think superb in every dimension.
I'm an electrical engineer, and I pay a lot of attention to the technical content of those recordings. The quality of sound they squeezed out of equipment that by today's standards is like a biplane compared to a fly-by-wire fifth-generation fighter jet, is nonetheless marvelous. It showed such character on the part of everyone involved, including the technical people, that they were able to produce such beautiful results with zero — or at least minimal — digital signal processing. Perhaps that's why it sounds so good, I don't know.
But Steely Dan is absolutely in a class by themselves. In some ways they are only slightly ahead, but in others they lap the field more than once. There isn't a single category of production values that they don't excel in. All those fantastic session musicians gave their best, and they were able to do it because they were inspired by Fagen and Becker's incredibly dense, musically challenging and fascinating chords and rhythms.
The song Aja is an absolute masterpiece that is a musical miracle. Wayne Shorter sounds so good on it, picking up on the weird potential of the complex chord progression that's under him. And Steve Gadd's work is absolutely transcendent. The way he takes out Aja has always sounded to me like what a jazz drummer's experience of entering Heaven would be like. Endless tasty drive, with sparkling moments of virtuosity that is never too flashy, that makes you notice because of how cool and tight it is, not because of how loud it is.