Aging & Wisdom Quote by Walter Becker

Becker’s throwaway list is doing more work than it admits. It’s the sound of a musician refusing to be pinned to a single tribe - especially one as eager to canonize and police taste as the “serious music” crowd. The phrase “a mixture” leads with hybridity as principle, not exception. Old jazz signals lineage and craft, the deep grammar of harmony and swing that fed Steely Dan’s obsessively engineered grooves. Contemporary and pop are the anti-snob qualifiers: he’s not pretending the last meaningful record was cut in 1967, and he’s not embarrassed by the mainstream. “World beat stuff” is the most time-stamped term here, a 90s-2000s catchall that hints at curiosity while also betraying the era’s binning of global music into a single, marketable shelf. It’s cosmopolitan, but not sanctimonious about it.

Then comes the sly Becker tell: “various odds and ends.” That’s the shrug that undercuts the whole taxonomy. It implies that the best listening life is messy, partly accidental, full of one-off fascinations and guilty pleasures you don’t bother to justify. Coming from a musician associated with high craft and studio perfectionism, the casualness reads like strategy: taste as range, not résumé.

Context matters: Becker spent a career being treated as the brainy half of a “smart” band. This line pushes back against the idea that sophistication means narrowness. It frames listening as a working musician’s intake - sources, textures, and mood - not a manifesto.