The niggling concern was that such retro references might reflect a lack of genuine inspiration though, and a kind of career end. In the light of his eagerly anticipated new album, Blackstar, however, The Next Day might better be viewed as a clearing of the decks. But for his 27th studio album, has Bowie gone jazz? On first listens to Blackstar, released on January 8, Bowie’s 69th birthday, it certainly sounds like rock’s oldest futurist has dusted down his saxophone. They are tooting, parping, wailing and gusting all over the place, occupying rhythmic, atmospheric and lead parts, with guitars and keyboards intermingling in a weave of supporting roles. The saxophone was Bowie’s first instrument, which he started learning in his pre-teens inspired by a bohemian, jazz-loving elder half-brother, Terry Burns. Bowie once said that, aged 14, he couldn’t decide if he wanted “to be a rock’n’roll singer or John Coltrane”. David Bowie: the man who loved books Even in his rise to rock fame, Bowie remained a creature of the jazz age, at least in the sense of the boundary-crashing freedom that characterises his work. A new single, Lazarus, released today, may kick off in the vague realm of contemporary music, with spectral guitar and stuttering rhythms calling to mind the young British trio the xx, but it is not long before those saxophones are sighing and the beat is fragmenting. Just about holding it together are the familiar tones of Bowie’s teeth-gritted, tight-chested whisper of a vocal, proclaiming it is “This way or no way/ You know I’ll be free/ Just like that bluebird/ Now ain’t that just like me?” Sure sounds like jazz to me. The ambience is dense and lush, shaped by odd chord variations, burblings of electronica and sudden interjections of strange sound effects. It feels as bold and weird as anything in Bowie’s back catalogue, sure to delight some and infuriate others. An early version of Sue (Or In A Season of Crime) hinted at this new musical direction on his 2014 career compilation Nothing Has Changed. It mixed a jazzy melody to skittering drum’n’bass with a blizzard of horns, recalling the avant-garde experience. Bowie recruited his core band from the 55 Bar, a venerable jazz club in New York’s West Village, not far from his home in SoHo, where he has lived since 2003 with his wife Iman and 15-year-old daughter. He stopped by unannounced one Sunday night in 2014 to watch a quartet led by inventive saxophonist Donny McCaslin, featuring drummer Mark Guiliana, bassist Tim Lefebvre and keyboardist Jason Lindner. Bowie would have been treated to a set of dazzling, freewheeling improvised instrumentals, with roots in the early Seventies jazz fusion of Miles Davis, Weather Report and the Yellowjackets. Bowie subsequently invited the band to secret recording sessions with long-serving producer Tony Visconti in January this year at the Magic Shop, a discreet, surprisingly small and very old school studio near Bowie’s home where he recorded The Next Day. What Bowie has created with this hardcore jazz crew, though, is not something any jazz fan would recognise and is all the better for it. At its best, free jazz is amongst the most technically advanced and audacious music ever heard but it can be uncompromisingly difficult to listen to for the non-aficionado. The improvisational elements that make it so gladiatorial and hypnotic live can make it over complex and inaccessible on record. Bowie’s intriguing experiment has been to take this wild, abstract form and try to turn it into songs. Blackstar is an album on which words and melody gradually rise from a sonic swamp to sink their hooks in. It is probably as close as free jazz has ever got to pop. Only seven tracks and 42 minutes long, Blackstar is impressively hard to place in his back catalogue and feels completely self-contained. It has some of the off-kilter character of his late Seventies Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes and Lodger) but little of their electronic flavour. It is shot through with a late-life melancholy that sits intriguingly with the jazzy modulations. Beneath the swooning cinematic rush of Dollar Days beats a gorgeous, bittersweet piano ballad on which Bowie proclaims himself “dying to... fool them all again and again” but the phrase breaks apart until he sounds like he might be singing “I’m dying too.” It is a song that evokes and then dismisses regret. “If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to,” Bowie sings, “It’s nothing to me.” On epic closing track, I Can’t Give Everything Away, Bowie sounds like he is grappling with his own mystery: “Saying more and meaning less / Saying no but meaning yes / This is all I ever meant / This is the message that I sent.” What can it all mean? The man himself gives no interviews and apparently remains firm in his insistence that he will not tour again. Looking for clues in his music, we are confronted with inscrutability. A new Bowie co-scripted musical, Lazarus, opened off-Broadway last week, and is reportedly as impenetrable as it is lovely to look at. Baffling is a word that comes up a lot in reviews. But Bowie is a rare act who is at his best when he is at his least accessible. Lazarus is currently the hottest theatre ticket in New York. How wonderful if all of this actually represents an entirely new phase in Bowie’s extraordinary career. How fantastic to have an album as rich and strange as Blackstar that refuses to yield in a few listens. It suggests that, like a modern day Lazarus of pop, Bowie is well and truly back from beyond.
The restless journeyman was determined to continue experimenting despite his ailments: for these seven songs, the rocker tapped progressive jazz saxophonist Donny McCaslin and his tight-knit group of collaborators to bring demos like “Lazarus” and “Dollar Days” to life. “He was singing very passionately with a lot of energy and a lot of conviction and we were inspired by that,” McCaslin tells EW.com of the sessions, which spanned three one-week chunks from January to March. “He said something to me like, ‘Donny, I don’t know what’s going to come of this, but let’s have some fun.’” Despite the record’s dark lyrical content, which McCaslin says Bowie was still finalizing while recording, humor and spontaneity dominated the sessions, which would typically run from 11 a.m until 4 p.m. Bowie took an active role in the process, performing tracks in the room with the band and encouraging communication, interplay, and risk-taking.McCaslin shared his memories of the sessions with EW, including the contributions from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, Bowie’s affinity for D’Angelo and Kendrick Lamar’s new albums, and his reaction upon hearing the final product. DONNY MCCASLIN: Prior to the first recording sessions, David had sent me demos that he had made of around six or seven songs and I was immersing myself. I got together with my band — with the bassist, Tim Lefebvre, the keyboardist, Jason Lindner, and the drummer, Mark Guiliana — and we did a rehearsal just to make sure we were all on point with everything, because I wasn’t totally sure what to expect when I got to the studio. The spirit in the recording sessions couldn’t have been better. David was totally engaged, from the minute he walked in the door, and focused and also just had this great attitude. I remember him saying to Mark, “Feel free to play some odd meter stuff. Whatever you’re hearing, go for it.” It was that kind of spirit — just really open and collaborative. The work environment couldn’t have been better. One thing that was really inspiring about the dynamic was that David was singing with us — in the room with us. I was in the isolation booth and there’s a clear piece of glass and he was right on the other side of that and in the room with Tim and Mark and Jason. I’m an emotional player and I felt like that energy was moving around the room between us. A lot of communication and a lot of interplay. There was a lot of laughing and jokes. Fun stories going around. It was just fun. Tony Visconti was producing and it was neat to watch their dynamic and how they worked so well together in the studio. The two of them combed through everything we did and they made choices about what to use, what not to use. It was really interesting to see what they did with it after we finished. It was a lot of attention to detail. It was overwhelming to me just to hear the whole sonic montage and how they put it all together. The first week of January 2015 we did another week. And then in early March we did a roughly four or five day period of recording. James Murphy came in in the February sessions and was kind of in an unassigned role, but he ended up doing some things. He had these vintage synths. He did some neat percussion sounds, some electronic percussion sounds — I think on “Girl Loves Me.” He had some ideas about different sonic things to add to the tunes, which was cool. What stood out to you about Bowie during the Blackstar sessions? He was so present in the moment and so focused on pushing the envelope. The music on that record is not cookie-cutter pop music. It’s progressive, boundary-pushing music. He’s pushing the boundaries, completely committed to the art and living the art. My sense is that he was reading all the time, reading a lot of books, listening to a lot of different music, constantly living in that, living the art. Do you remember any of the art he was engaging with? I remember reading that Tony Visconti had talked about that we had been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly — I think I remember talking about that. D’Angelo’s record [Black Messiah] came out while we were in the midst of recording and I know [Bowie] had checked that out. I remember talking to him generally about the grandeur of Charlie Parker. Had he written the lyrics by the time the sessions began? When he was singing, the passion and the conviction of what he sang was really affecting me. It wasn’t that he said “bluebird” or “blackstar,” it wasn’t so much that; it was the feeling that he was singing with. It was inspiring to me and really exciting. He was working some of [the lyrics] out while we were recording, so some of the songs weren’t finished while we were in the studio. He was making notes — I could observe him just processing that and working with that while we were recording. When you communicated with him in November and December, what was his spirit like? What did he think of the album? It was mostly about the record. It was very positive stuff. I think he was very happy with how the record turned out. David Bowie has been remembered variously in tributes as a visionary singer, a pioneering artist and as a trailblazing king of reinvention who revelled in unveiling striking new personas. The newspaper and magazine obituaries that memorialised his life presented him as a musically precocious child but said little about the role his parents played in nurturing his musical aspirations. A letter from Bowie’s cousin in response to The Economist’s obituary reveals the conviction his parents ‘John’ and ‘Peggy’ had in their son’s ability to succeed and how they proudly encouraged him. In her letter, Kristina Amadeus recalls how a young Bowie was given a plastic saxophone, a tin guitar and a record player and described how the pair would “dance like possessed elves” to Elvis Presley records as children. She thanks for the newspaper for the “insight and sensitivity” it showed in its own obituary, but takes issue with one part. “It is not true that he ‘grew up as David Jones, a sharp-toothed kid from dull suburban Bromley whose parents held no aspirations for him’,” she writes. “David’s parents, especially his father, ‘John’ Jones, encouraged him from the time he was a toddler. His mother, Peggy, spoke often of our deceased grandfather, who was a bandmaster in the army and played many wind instruments. “Although Uncle John never lived to see David’s huge success, he was convinced it would become a reality. My beloved David fulfilled and exceeded all his father’s dreams.” Three years ago, with litte warning, David Bowie ended a decade-long break from studio releases with The Next Day. The second album he’s released since that unexpected return to the limelight is an even greater surprise: one of the most aggressively experimental records the singer has ever made. Produced with longtime collaborator Tony Visconti and cut with a small combo of New York-based jazz musicians whose sound is wreathed in arctic electronics, Blackstar is a ricochet of textural eccentricity and pictorial-shrapnel writing. It’s confounding on first impact: the firm swing and giddy vulgarity of “ ‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore”; Bowie’s croons and groans, like a doo-wop Kraftwerk, in the sexual dystopia of “Girl Loves Me”; the spare beaten-spirit soul of “Dollar Days.” But the mounting effect is wickedly compelling. This album represents Bowie’s most fulfilling spin away from glam-legend pop charm since 1977’s Low. Blackstar is that strange, and that good. The longest reach is up front, in the episodic, ceremonial noir of the title track. Bowie’s gauzy vocal prayer and wordless spectral harmonies hover over drum seizures; saxophonist Donny McCaslin laces the stutter and chill like Andy Mackay in early-Seventies Roxy Music. The song drops to a blues-ballad stroll, but it is an eerie calm with unsettling allusions to violent sacrifice, especially given recent events. (No who or why is specified, but McCaslin has said the song is “about ISIS.”) “Something happened on the day he died/Spirit rose a meter, then stepped aside,” Bowie sings with what sounds like numbed grace. “Somebody else took his place and bravely cried: I’m a blackstar.” His use of an ideogram for the album’s title makes sense here – there is no light at the end of this tale. The album includes a dynamic honing of Bowie’s 2014 single “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” with less brass and more malevolent programming; the title song from his current off-Broadway musical production, Lazarus (that’s Bowie firing those grunting blasts of guitar); and a blunt honesty at the finish. Bowie turns 69 on January 8th, the day Blackstar comes out. In “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” he states his case for the dignity of distance – his refusal to tour (so far) and engage with the media circus – against guitarist Ben Monder’s lacerating soprano-fuzz guitar, a sly evocation of Robert Fripp’s iconic soloing in 1977’s “Heroes.” “This is all I ever meant/That’s the message that I sent,” Bowie sings in a voice largely free of effects – clear, elegant and emphatic.