In January 2016, David Bowie released what would be his final album, Blackstar, two days before his death. Recorded in secret the previous year, it saw the legendary musician working with Donny McCaslin and his jazz quartet, a band whose contributions to the album made its various stylistic and genre shifts part of its lasting power. This June, McCaslin will be bringing most of that band to perform the BLACKSTAR Orchestra with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. I had the honor of talking to McCaslin about the creation of the BLACKSTAR Symphony, how it relates to the original Blackstar album, and how working with David Bowie affected his career as a bandleader and musician.
Tyler King: Hey Donny! You recently played some shows at The Cutting Room in New York with some other David Bowie alumni. How did those shows go?
Donny McCaslin: They were great! Gail Ann Dorsey was there, who will be with me in San Francisco for the BLACKSTAR Symphony show, and she’s just such a powerful force. She brings such an emotional depth to everything she does, especially with David’s music. It’s really inspiring. Gerry Leonard was playing guitar along with Mark Plati, along with a long list of great musicians who, pretty much all of them, played with David at different periods of his career. So one of the unique things about the Cutting Room shows that we do every year is that all of these different eras of his music are brought together, and they’re played at the highest caliber imaginable. There are people in the crowd who have been coming every year, and it’s just a really great loving environment for David and his music.
TK: How does it feel to have been “taken in” with other musicians who played with David over the years?
DM: It’s been wonderful. There’s a sense of community among all of the people who played with him. Of course I haven’t met everybody who was in all of his bands, but the people that I have met and interacted with, Gail especially, there’s a real sense of community and support and appreciation of each person’s unique experience and contributions with working with David and his impact on our lives, both personally and professionally. It was really transformative for me personally and I know it was with Gail, and I know it was with Mark, and so on, and I really love being a part of that community and hearing people’s stories and experiences with him. One of the common things that always comes up is David’s humanity and what a remarkable and genuine person he was, and how that had a deep impact on everybody.
TK: What came first: the Cutting Room shows, or the creation of the BLACKSTAR Symphony?
DM: The shows at The Cutting Room. Those shows are kind of like “greatest hits” shows. “Station To Station,” “Moonage Daydream,” songs like that, and they’re presented pretty closely to how they’re presented on the albums. When it comes to the BLACKSTAR Symphony, it’s a presentation of the Blackstar record and then other songs by David that feel connected to that record. We really use that album as a blueprint and point of departure, but the goal is for it to be a new piece of art that stands on its own. We integrate a 65-piece orchestra with the band and the singers to make something that feels new and an extension of the record. The DNA of the record is absolutely present, but there are points where we stretch things out or develop things because we have the luxury of having a symphony orchestra as part of the ensemble.
But I do want to get across that the BLACKSTAR Symphony is not like a tribute show. Obviously it is in terms of, we’re playing his songs, but we’re wanting to do something that we feel like David would be into; extending the songs and taking them in new directions. It’s not just a note-for-note recounting of the recordings.
TK: That’s actually a question that I was going to ask, which was about the importance of either live improvisation or this internal struggle of the musician of how accurate or faithful do you stay to the original recordings, and is that as artistically fulfilling as taking the songs in new directions, like you mentioned.
DM: That’s a great question, and I would say that for me personally, coming from a background of being an improviser in the world of jazz music, there’s always this desire to keep things moving forward. And that manifests itself into things like not wanting to play the same solo over and over again and always finding new ways to explore the improvisation and interactions with the band, and in this case we’ve designed it where there’s opportunities for that, for improvisation and interaction with the band, as well as interacting with the orchestra. So we have those moments where the unexpected can enter the room, which is what I look for as an improviser.
That being said, there is a strong DNA of the record there. You’re not going to be sitting in the audience thinking to yourself, ‘Wow, that doesn’t sound at all like “Dollar Days.”‘ Don’t worry, you’re going to hear “Dollar Days!” We just had an organic process of finding moments in the songs where we could stretch things out. For example, on “Girl Loves Me” we expanded this middle section where different harmonic ideas came in, so there definitely are moments like that, but it’s a balancing act for sure.
Blackstar is not a record that was ever played live. And it’s a record that people bought but maybe didn’t necessarily listen to tons of times because it’s such an emotional record to listen to for Bowie fans because of all of the circumstances around it. I’ve met so many fans who tell me how much they love the record but they can only listen to it a certain amount of times because it brings up so many deep feelings. Which I understand, it’s the same thing for me. So with those emotions being an element of this too, we couldn’t completely reinvent these songs.
TK: When the initial idea came for the BLACKSTAR Symphony, was part of the motivation to go out there and make it happen because Blackstar is an album that was never played live?
DM: I don’t think so. What happened was, I was doing a project in Europe with the Metropol Orchestra, it being my first time actually playing with an orchestra. We were doing a bunch of my own music from a record of mine called Blow. With there being multiple days of rehearsal, we decided to include a couple of David’s songs in the program: “Look Back In Anger” which is one of my favorite bangers, and…
TK: Great song.
DM: Great song! Love it! Underrated song!
TK: The whole Lodger album is underrated.
DM: I love Lodger, it’s so good! I love that record so much. And the other song was “Warszawa.” I had recorded a version of that song and had played it with my band right after David passed for about a year as a tribute to him. So we reworked those songs for an orchestra and they sounded great. Like, really great. I was at dinner with Jules Buckley, who was a conductor with the Metropol Orchestra, and we were talking about the rehearsals. Prior to that, I had been presented with multiple opportunities to play Blackstar, and I was just never interested. We would play “Lazarus” as an instrumental, but I just didn’t want to do the entire thing. None of the opportunities that were presented to me felt like genuine ways of presenting those songs in a live setting. But at that dinner, Jules and I were talking about how great “Warszawa” sounded with an orchestra, and somehow immediately the idea formed in my head of doing Blackstar in that same way with a full orchestra.
So the idea wasn’t really coming from a place of looking at the record as having never been played live before that, it was more of, “Wouldn’t this be an exciting way to present this album?” Because the album holds a lot of meaning for me, as well as all of the guys in the band, and I think I might have felt protective of that, not wanting to lessen it or cheapen it by just doing it in a way that didn’t feel really special. This opportunity, this aesthetic, felt like we were doing something that felt really special and the right way to do it.
TK: You do these Cutting Room Floor shows with the other Bowie alumni every year. Is that where you got the idea to get Gail Ann Dorsey onboard for the BLACKSTAR Symphony?
DM: I have to think back… No, let me tell you what happened. I met her for the first time I think by doing the Cutting Room shows, and I was just so taken with her musicianship and the depth of her expression. And my first thought was, ‘I want to collaborate with her.’ Initially I sent her a song I had written and asked her if she might be hearing some lyrics for it, but that didn’t really pan out for whatever reason. But I ended up writing another song for her with a couple of my songwriting partners called “Eye Of The Beholder,” which ended up on my 2018 album Blow. And she just totally nailed it, it just sounds… I love it. I just love it so dearly.
So then that led to the same songwriting team and I writing another song for her called “Head Of Mine,” and that ended up being released as a stand-alone single. She would appear as a special guest with my band around that time doing those two songs as well as “Lazarus” and “Look Back In Anger,” and one or two songs of hers as well. So her being involved with the BLACKSTAR Symphony just organically came about because of our own history together as artists.
TK: You mentioned earlier about how you came from an improvisational background. When David Bowie presented you with the songs that would become Blackstar, whether it be demos or song sketches, did he encourage improvisation or did he want you and your band to stick more to the confines of what those initial demos were?
DM: By the first day we met in the studio, I had already gone over the demos and knocked out a bunch of stuff and my band had already run through all of the songs once to make sure we were all on the same page. Basically the first day in the studio, before we played a note, he said to me, “I want you to go to wherever you’re hearing. Don’t worry about how this will be classified genre-wise: rock, jazz, whatever. Just feel completely free to do whatever you want.” And that was already my intention, but it was great to hear it from him. I couldn’t have asked for a more freeing creative environment to step into.
The songs, as you know, are all really strong, and the demos were strong. It was all really clear and we weren’t required to build songs from scratch; all of the foundation was already there, so we just tried to serve the music. Whatever we were playing is what we felt like served the song and the moment that we were all participating in.
TK: Where did the idea of re-recording the song “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)” come from?
DM: That came from David. Most of the songs on Blackstar are first or second takes, but “Sue” is the exception to that, just because the original version that David did with Maria Schneider was done with her entire orchestra, which I was a member of and a part of the original recording, but it was daunting because we had to really think about how we wanted to approach the form of that song. So that one was multiple takes because we were experimenting with how far away from Maria’s form did we want to get. What ended up happening was I did a reduction of her horn parts and I did some of those parts on woodwinds, which I think helped tie the two versions together. All in all, it was maybe five or six takes just to get the form right.
TK: If I were to be asked what some of my favorite moments in David Bowie’s discography are, so many of those moments are on the Blackstar record. And the one that always makes me stop and take notice of it and devastates me are your two solos on “Dollar Days.” I was wondering if you had any memory of what your thought process was when recording your parts for that song, and how receptive David was to your contributions to that song in particular?
DM: What I remember about that song is that it was an outlier in how it came to be. For the rest of the songs he had demos that he had prepared at home for us, but with that particular song it’s like one of those mythical stories that you hear where a guy just picks up a guitar and starts playing in the studio, but that’s exactly what happened. David just picked up an acoustic guitar in the control room and started playing something, and we were just listening to it and Jason Lindner came up with a great piano part after sorting out the chords before Tim Lefebvre picked up the bass.
It all happened so quickly and so organically and I remember the question that David posed was, “What do we do for the solo section?” And I remember suggesting I modulate and we did it, and from the time he picked up the guitar to us tracking it it was maybe a half hour or so. There were a couple of passes, and I did the modulation with the solo, and it all happened so quickly that I can’t remember having a particular creative thought on that tune outside of the global thing of just trying to serve the moment and the music, and being present in the music and taking it to where it felt natural to go. And that’s basically what happened! It was one solo on one take and it was over.
We finished that song and that might have been it for that day, but then we went on and recorded some other stuff. And it was months and months later, before Blackstar came out, where I was doing the first interview about the record with a magazine and they were asking me about the songs on the album, and with that song I had no idea what they were talking about! [laughs] Because it wasn’t called “Dollar Days” then, it was just untitled, and so I had no memory of this song until I heard it! The lyrics on that, it’s just so deep, and I couldn’t be happier with how that one turned out. It’s really beautiful.
TK: So you weren’t necessarily privy to what the track listing for the album was going to be before it came out?
DM: That’s right, yeah. And not only that, but I didn’t know what songs he would choose. We recorded a lot more than what came out, and some of those did end up coming out on the No Plan EP later on. And there were some songs we did where we would think, ‘Oh wow that sounds great, that would be great for the record,’ but I did know that he wanted to release it on vinyl. So it wasn’t going to be an hour-and-fifteen-minute record, it would be on the shorter side. But yeah, the track selection was all David and Tony Visconti, his producer.
TK: So was there more material recorded than ended up being released on the No Plan EP?
DM: Yeah, there’s definitely one that I remember really liking and it hasn’t come out. But the thing is, I don’t know what state it was in when David passed away. Were the vocals finished? Were the lyrics finished? I don’t know. I do remember him saying that everything was going to come out eventually, but that particular song hasn’t come out. I’m assuming it’s because it wasn’t finished by him.
TK: Or they’re saving it for an anniversary box set of the record.
DM: Yeah, it’s possible!
TK: I remember reading a previous interview with you where you mentioned that you and David were in the early stages of planning him doing a surprise appearance at one of your shows and doing some songs from Blackstar. I’m wondering how far along those talks got and if there was any discussion about what specific songs you would have done together?
DM: My band was making its debut at The Village Vanguard about two weeks after the record came out. So the last time I saw David we were talking about it and he wanted to sit in with us at those shows and do “Sue” and “Lazarus,” if I’m not mistaken. We talked about having him come early and do a soundcheck and just light talks about the logistics of it, but you know, it all depended on how he was feeling. But before he passed, that was the plan. He was going to show up and play those tunes. How amazing would that have been? David Bowie singing at The Village Vanguard. Man, that would have been incredible.
The other thing, too, is that he was planning on recording new music with us. The last time we talked it was on the phone and he said he was writing new music and wanted to go back to the studio in January with us. Blackstar, obviously, has such heavy themes of mortality and part of the narrative around the record was that it was his goodbye gift to everybody, and while I think that’s true it’s one of those situations where multiple things are true. It’s a great way to have left his mark as an artist, but at the same time he was still moving forward and we were going to record some new music.
TK: Wow. Just a couple more questions. You mentioned earlier on about the impact that working with him had on you both personally and professionally. I’m wondering specifically how did it impact or influence your own work as a composer, as a musician, as a bandleader?
DM: Part of it is that after working with him, everything seemed possible, in a way that it didn’t before. I would think, ‘Boy, wouldn’t it be great to collaborate with so-and-so, or do something with this other artist,’ and it felt like it was hard to realize something like that. After doing Blackstar it felt like, ‘Well no, this can happen,’ because this experience just went down and it personified these ideals that I was always striving for. Not worrying about how people categorize your music and being really true to what your vision is, and following your own path, whether you’re clear of what it is or not.
There’s that famous quote of his where he says something about how you know you’re in trouble if you keep doing the same thing over and over, and you’re onto something if you’re uncomfortable. So he encouraged me to be more uncomfortable in my process and writing and being a bandleader. So from working on Blackstar there’s a through-line that goes all the way to my record Blow, where the saxophone isn’t at the forefront. It’s more of an album centered around vocals and songwriting, which was a completely different thing for me. And yes, I was uncomfortable, but I also trusted that it would work. He encouraged me to let my artistic imagination go where it wants to go and follow that path without compromising.
TK: Obviously people usually don’t think like this, but as you were working on the record or between sessions finishing and the release of it, or even when it released either the couple of days before David passed or immediately after he passed, was there any idea of the impact or, for lack of a better term, the legacy that the record would have? And also, especially after he passed, is there any kind of weight that you feel having been the last “big collaborator” with David?
DM: I think the weight that I felt was more along the lines of, ‘That was such a special, transformative experience. I don’t want to do anything to lessen what that was. It was made with such honesty and integrity, and I want everything I do going forward regarding that record to have those same values.’ And that’s what I felt. I wanted to represent that in every facet, those high artistic ideals that that album has.
To your question about the thoughts during the recording or right after, I think that during the recording those thoughts would come up a little bit regarding what this experience meant for my life and my career, but mostly I just tried to shoo them away and not think about it. I wanted to focus on being present in the music, because that’s what mattered, and giving it my total undivided attention. It was in such rapid succession that the record came out and then he passed away, which was so intense emotionally that that became… so many outlets were reaching out to me for comments on his passing and I was just trying to navigate that and stay true to how he thought he would want me to handle it. I was thinking a lot about his family and how difficult that period must have been for them, and people who were in his inner circle. I wanted to honor them with how I handled it.
And yeah, I was grieving. He meant a lot to me. It was such an utterly affirming experience to work with him. He was a great musician but he was an even better person. It was such a profound experience for me that it added this other layer of intensity for me when he passed. I had the privilege of being on the road after that and interacting with some of his fans and they would tell me how his work had affected their lives. It was really powerful to hear stories of what his impact was like on these people who didn’t know him and had never met him. It was a testament to his art to hear how deeply it affected them and it was humbling and I felt privileged to be part of those conversations.
TK: Earlier you mentioned that the word that you would ascribe to David was his humanity, but in regards to hearing you talk about working with him and getting to know him as a person and how that affected how you feel about your art, going all the way up to now with the BLACKSTAR Symphony, it also sounds like there was a deep integrity to both him as a person and him as an artist. And it also sounds like there’s a deep integrity to you as an artist and also how you feel about Blackstar as an album, what with having turned down multiple opportunity to play it live and wanting to present it in a way that you think he would find interesting.
DM: Thank you.
TK: I never met him. I became a fan a couple of years after he stopped touring, so I never even got a chance to see him live. And in talking to you, as well as other people I’ve talked who have worked with him, it sounds like his sense of integrity was able to transfer from him to everyone he worked with, and deepened their resolve as a musician and how they approached their craft from then on.
DM: Yes, yes. That was beautiful, and I agree. When I talk to Gail and Mark and other people about having worked with him, that’s what I hear. I concur.
Visit Donny McCaslin’s website here
Buy tickets to see BLACKSTAR Symphony on June 26th here
