JAZZING UP HIS RESUME
McCaslin worked with Bowie
Don’t get Donny McCaslin wrong.
Yes, the jazz saxophonist and bandleader was feeling a bit burnt out during a recent interview. He was home in Brooklyn with his young family, but also feeling “haggard” following a stretch of touring. This year, McCaslin expects to be on the road for more than five months, visiting locales as distant as Australia and Japan as a leader for the first time.
But McCaslin, who has a famously sunny personality, said he is simply grateful to be so busy, thanks for the most part to David Bowie having come into his life.
“It really is like a dream come true,” said McCaslin, 50. “In a way, when I was younger and practising so hard and somebody would say, ‘What is it that you want to do with your career?’ it’s like, you know, I’d like the opportunity to work with some great musicians who I can learn from, and I’d like to be able to tour with my own band, playing original music. And I have had that to the full for the last year and a half, and it’s continuing for at least another year or so, and we’ll see what happens after that.
“So I’m grateful for this opportunity and just trying to take it all in as I do it and make every detail of every performance be the best it can be, because you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”
This week, McCaslin has been bringing the electric-jazz quartet that backed up on Bowie on his Grammy-winning swan-song album Blackstar to Canadian jazz festivals, working west to east. He plays two shows at the NAC Studio on Thursday night.
A towering instrumental voice in jazz for more than two decades, McCaslin has played a wider range of venues and for more diverse audiences since his work on Blackstar brought him to the attention of a beyond-jazz audience.
Now playing rock-friendly standing-room clubs as well as jazz festivals, clubs and soft-seat performance halls, McCaslin is at last one of those rare exceptions — a contemporary jazz musician recognized and admired outside of the jazz bubble.
“I’ve heard people say, ‘I don’t usually like jazz, but I really like what you guys are doing.’ I appreciate that,” McCaslin said.
The go-between that brought McCaslin and Bowie together, back in the summer of 2014, was jazz composer, arranger and orchestra leader Maria Schneider, in whose band McCaslin is a vital soloist. Schneider and Bowie were set to collaborate on the harrowing, mind-expanding, one-off track Sue, which would feature McCaslin’s soaring horn. But Schneider also thought Bowie might benefit further from McCaslin’s talents and services down the road.
Schneider brought Bowie to hear McCaslin’s group play at the 55 Bar, a wee, dive-y, downstairs jazz haunt in New York’s Greenwich Village. “I did see him out of the corner of my eye and basically tried not to think about it,” McCaslin said with a laugh.
A week later, McCaslin met Bowie for the first time.
“He couldn’t have been more generous in spirit and just warm,” the saxophonist said. Bowie asked for McCaslin’s contact information. The next day, the singer sent the saxophonist an email with a demo version of one of his new songs attached.
“The gist of the email was really funny and succinct. It said something like, ‘It would be a dream for me to record two or three songs with the Donny McCaslin group,’ ” McCaslin said. “I remember just looking at the email, going, ‘Wow! Awesome, awesome!’ ”
In 2016, McCaslin’s group spent weeks with Bowie in the studio, recording not just a few songs but all the music that would become, with surprisingly little reworking, Blackstar.
McCaslin said that he and his bandmates — keyboardist Jason Lindner, bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Mark Guiliana — brought the spontaneity of jazz to Bowie’s project.
“In improvised music, a big part of that magic is that interplay, playing off each other, that give and take, the dialogue. It’s so much of what we love in that music,” he said. “And David provided this new framework with these great songs he’d written. … The interplay that happens when we perform together, that’s documented on that record.
“But he was also totally participating in it when he was singing and playing guitar,” McCaslin added. “He was just right in there with us and pushing us and inspiring us, and I’d like to think that we were doing the same with him.”
Blackstar was released Jan. 8, 2016, and Bowie died just two days later.
“He was suddenly gone,” McCaslin said. “That in and of itself was just devastating, emotionally.”
On a more upbeat note, when Blackstar won five Grammy Awards this year, including best rock performance, best rock song and alternative music album, it was McCaslin, wearing a Blackstar T-shirt, who bounded up to the podium, beaming, to accept the prizes and pay tribute to Bowie.
McCaslin said that these days, he doesn’t listen often to Blackstar.
“It brings up a lot of feelings for me about him being gone, but it also is inspiring to me when I listen to it, and it’s exciting,” he said.
Last summer, McCaslin returned to the studio with his band to record his latest album, Beyond Now. It features music he’d written the summer before, after his Blackstar experience, plus two Bowie covers, A Small Plot of Land and Warszawa.
“I’d been so immersed in the Blackstar music for months, of course it was still really present when I was writing, and I feel there are direct influences from his writing,” McCaslin said. He added that the influences of Aphex Twin, Kendrick Lamar and Deadmaus also weighed on his latest album, which was released last fall, setting up opportunities for McCaslin to bring his music to new audiences.
“And then, I’m tired,” he said with a laugh, reflecting on the intensities of combining the road life and domestic life.
“I’m learning how to lick my wounds while raising children. I’m a little haggard, but it’s OK. Today, I can do some writing and practising and maybe have a little nap. That’s a luxury. I’m good.”