Steely Dan add date at Humphreys Concerts, while Cuban music festival show falls through

May 16, 2019 4 PM PT

A Steely Dan performance has been added to the 2019 Humphreys Concerts by the Bay season schedule.

The Sept. 25 date here will mark the band’s first San Diego appearance since its two-show run at Humphreys in April 2017, which took place less than five months before the death of Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker.

The group is now led solely by keyboardist and singer Donald Fagen, who co-founded Steely Dan with Becker in 1972. Fagen is now the only original member of the band who is still on board.

Tickets for Steely Dan’s Sept. 25 Humphreys go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. at ticketmaster.com. They are priced at $190 each. That is $5 more than tickets cost for the band’s two 2017 shows at the same venue, both of which sold out. Dinner and hotel packages are also available for the Sept. 25 concert.

Meanwhile, the May 23 Humphreys concert by El Gran Festival de Musica Cubana, an all-star lineup of Cuban artists, has been canceled, along with the rest of the tour. “Scheduling conflicts” are being cited as the reason for the cancellation, which was apparently prompted by the failure of some of the tour’s performers to obtain U.S. visas.

Tickets for the El Gran Festival de Musica Cubana concert here can be refunded at point of purchase.

George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 San Diego Press Club awards and a first prize-winner at the 2022 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”