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A message to jazz from David Bowie

Backstory:
David Bowie is one of the people that have formed the musical taste of generations – innovator, aesthete, gentleman, pioneer, knowing no boundaries and always one step ahead…
On the other side there are the new musicians- contemporary, brave, creative, open to new things.
So it goes: the year is 2015, David Bowie is living in New York city, he already knows that he is ill and dying. He begins the search for someone he can pass the baton to. He first hears the Donny McCaslin quartet in the tiny Bar 55 and as Donny McCaslin later puts it, he could not believe he got an email from David Bowie himself. The journey begins - the last one for David Bowie.
The story itself is very vividly described by his producer and longtime friend Tony Visconti – I will not go into details.
Two things are interesting though – the time in which all this is taking place and the biographies of the new musicians, taking over the reins.
The time – 2015 – the world is lacking ideas, it is filled with bad quality products, nothing worthwhile can come out of this world and the already diagnosed David Bowie knows that…
But on the other side there is life, ideas; there is energy, passion and drive.
It becomes clear that the only way in which David Bowie can leave a message behind and do his job is to collaborate with exactly these people in New York. Tony Visconti said something great about this: “Whatever it was we threw at them, they handled it.”
Then there were the people born and raised in New York, and not just there. For them music was above everything else. Above money and vanity. People with a large musical biography, focused on the meaning and the core of things, not the easy stuff. At the time of recording the album, Marc Giuliana’s reputation precedes him. He has projects going on with leading musicians from all corners of the world. In the meantime, at the age of 35, he is also a percussions teacher and jams in the finest New York clubs. The same goes for the rest of the musicians. David Bowie first hears them perform as the Donny McCaslin quartet, but maybe the most avant-garde project some of them participate in is Beat Music – a lot of electronic sounds with a combination of Giuliana’s acoustic drum beats. For those familiar with the New York jazz scene (and not only, because Giuliana also plays on the magical “Abu navas rhapsody” by Dhafer Youssef, together with Tigran Hamasyan) there is no mistaking that particular style of playing.
And that’s how they joined Blackstar - Donny McCaslin (saxophone) and Mark Giuliana (percussions), Tim Lefebvre (bass) and a little later, in order to “finish off and fix” the overall sound – Jason Lindner on various kinds of keys.
All these musicians have been playing together for a long time, in all kinds of variations, but the one David Bowie hears them in is the Donny McCaslin quartet. Outside of that, each one of the participants has an individual formation, where they take the lead.
That’s how it all began. Step by step the meeting takes place and these two supposedly different worlds collide and find a common ground.
Blackstar is a goodbye letter. Blackstar is a legacy, that is yet to be read carefully and fully understood. It shows many people the door to a whole new world – the world of improvisations, the music of today’s world. It also made a group of people from the New York jazz scene, previously held back by the laws of the business and only recognized by real aficionados, a lot more popular.
This is the legacy.

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