David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ Remembered by Donnie McCaslin

UNITED KINGDOM – JUNE 13: ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL Photo of IOW FEST/STUART MOSTYN, David Bowie performs live on stage and headlines at Isle of Wight Festival Sunday 13 June 2004 (Photo by Stuart Mostyn/Redferns)

Redferns

Jazz saxophonist and composer Donny McCaslin’s introduction to the work of David Bowie was the massively successful 1983 album Let’s Dance. Then he became acquainted with some of the music icon’s well-known hits, including 1985’s “This Is Not America,” a collaboration with the Pat Metheny Group. But when McCaslin and his fellow New York City-based bandmates began working on what turned out to be Bowie’s final album, 2016’s Blackstar, he started to familiarize himself with more of Bowie’s works.

“I reached out to him and I said, ‘Well, I’m starting to look back in your catalog and listen to some other stuff,’” McCaslin recalls. “He asked me, ‘Well, what are you listening to?’ So I sent him maybe 20 songs. His response was something like, ‘That’s old stuff. I’m into something new now.’ I thought, ‘Well, that’s a clue to me to stop listening to his recorded history and filter the songs that he’s sending me through the aesthetic that I and my band had created. I realized he had chosen us because he was, I think, drawn to what we were doing in that moment.”

With its jazz-rock and avant-garde leanings, and propelled by the performances of McCaslin and his band, Blackstar became a fitting swansong by Bowie, who died on Jan. 10, 2016, two days after its release. Both that album and the No Plan EP, whose music was recorded during those sessions, are included on the recently released Bowie box I Can’t Give Everything Away (2002-2006). That set also contains the studio albums Heathen, Reality and The Next Day, a previously unreleased 2002 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and rare non-album songs.

“I felt like it was a great record when we were recording it,” McCaslin says of Blackstar. “It was just song after song of really strong writing and performing. I knew we played great. And I knew he was utterly happy with the result of what had happened.”

An established musician in the New York City jazz scene, McCaslin got the call to work with Bowie more than 10 years ago through the American composer and jazz orchestra leader Maria Schneider. “One day, she called me up and said, ‘Hey, we were talking about the sort of rhythmic underpinning of this piece, and you came to mind, and I played David your [2012] record Casting for Gravity.’ And I told him he should do something with you. I was like, ‘Wow. Awesome.’”

A few weeks later, Schneider recommended that Bowie collaborate with McCaslin and the band, whose lineup included keyboardist Jason Lindner, bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Mark Guiliana. Then Bowie and Schneider saw the band play at the 55 Bar in New York City. “I saw him out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t meet him, per se, that night,” McCaslin remembers. It was during his involvement in the first workshop session for the song “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime),” which later appeared on the 2014 Bowie compilation Nothing Has Changed, that McCaslin formally met the English musician.

“We all got there [to the studio] early, as you can imagine,” he recalls, “We’re all excited and stuff, David came in. He was right on time. And he was sort of, ‘Oh, am I late? I’m so sorry.’ He was very genuine and humble right from the get-go. That really struck me.

“Then he came right up to me and we started talking and talked about the gig and talked about doing something together. He literally pulled out a small black book and asked me to write my phone number and my email address. I just remember thinking in that moment, ‘I can’t believe I’m writing my information to David Bowie’s black book.’ The next morning, there was an email from him saying he’d like to record a few songs with me and my band. And so that’s where it started.”

In January 2015, McCaslin and the band began recording with Bowie and producer Tony Visconti at the Magic Shop in New York City; they would later be joined during the sessions by guitarist Ben Monder. As McCaslin tells it, Bowie had earlier sent him about 5-6 demos. “We got together once just to play through the stuff and make sure we were all on the same page,” McCaslin says about the band. “Everybody had done their homework. We went to the studio when David came in. He sat down next to me and he said something to the effect of, ‘I just want you to do whatever you’re hearing and to not worry about what this music will be classified as, if it’s going to be jazz or rock. I just want you to have fun.’ To hear him articulate that was very affirming.”

The energy from the sessions contributed to an atmosphere of spontaneity, resulting in a limited number of takes; McCaslin cites the recording of “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” as an example. “I remember at one point I was playing and sort of reaching for it. And I squeaked a little bit. I felt a little out of control. Something happened with Mark, too. And we went back in to listen to it. Mark said, ‘Man, I was playing so hard that I dropped my drumstick in the middle of the take.’

“We were both sort of a little apologetic, like, ‘Oh, can we do another take, please?’ And David was, ‘Okay, okay.’ So we do another take, and it’s cleaner for Mark and me. But we go back and listen, and David absolutely preferred the primal energy of the first one.”

The highlight of the album is the title song, which recalled Bowie’s “Station to Station,” from the 1976 record of the same name, in terms of its experimentation, length and stylistic shift halfway through the track. “He sent [the demo] in two halves,” McCaslin remembers. “So the first half is the song as you hear it on the record, and then there’s the free section in the middle. And that, he said, would be improvised. The second half is what you hear after the improvised section.

“I believe that we did the [first half of the] song in one take. Having Ben there to help provide the atmospheric cloud that happens in the middle was so great for the vibe and the flow when we were in that moment. I can’t remember if we stopped and then did the second half, but I know we did the first half and the interlude. I remember it felt great in the studio. And then the rest of it, I was just in the moment playing and just bouncing off David. It all happened really quickly. That’s just such a powerful song.”

More than a decade after its recording, the track “Lazarus” remains a poignant song from Blackstar as it hints at Bowie’s impending death (“Look up here, I’m in heaven”). “It’s a really emotional tune,” McCaslin says. “I remember when we were recording it, he had placeholder lyrics. I don’t know how much he changed that before the final version. Maybe not at all. I remember just looking at his silhouette, and he’s singing, and I was just imagining the saxophone sort of as a pillow supporting right around his voice. That was the image I had in mind when we were doing it. That and then also just reacting and responding to the emotional intensity with which he sang that song…David’s delivery and the lyrical content — it really touches on a lot of deep emotions for sure.”

“I Can’t Give Everything Away,” which now serves as the title of the new box set, concludes the album on a dreamy, buoyant note. “It feels optimistic with a touch of melancholy,” McCaslin says. “I love that song so much.” He further adds: “I overdubbed the solo [on that track. I was like, ‘Is that solo good?’ And he was just so happy.”

McCaslin says that when he first heard the whole record, he looked up and Bowie suddenly appeared. “I was in his office, and then we started talking. He was so utterly happy with how the record had come out. To me, that was really that was kind of all that mattered. We just played our asses off, and he was so great. From start to finish, his performances were so high. I knew it was a great record. I say this humbly: I felt like it deserved the accolades because it’s really a great record.”

Upon its release, Blackstar posthumously became Bowie’s first-ever number one album on the Billboard charts, and later earned a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music album in 2017. Its legacy continues through the Blackstar Symphony, spearheaded by McCaslin, which has been performed live.

“It’s not always a note-by-note representation of the record,” he says of that project. “The aesthetic was, ‘Let’s take this as the DNA of the project, but let’s create some new art with it. Let’s take some chances here and there, open things up.’ It’s not like the orchestra is just playing a tapestry of whole notes behind us, but that they’re really involved. When it’s at its zenith, you hear the orchestra, you hear the band, and you hear the singers all together.

“So we do the record, then we do some songs that I feel are connected to Blackstar from David’s discography, and then the orchestra leaves, and then we do like an encore where we just switch the tunes out depending on what we’re feeling, stuff that feels. It’s really fun to do that, and it’s been growing.”

The experience of working on Blackstar has also informed the sound on McCaslin’s subsequent albums, among them 2018’s Blow (His latest album is the rock-driven Lullaby for the Lost). For him, Blackstar remains life-changing nearly 10 years after its initial release. “It’s something that I just feel proud of and also grateful to have experienced something like that,” McCaslin says. “It was so beautiful. He was just a remarkable man, really.”