Bill Murray, Jan Vogler discover New Worlds in an unlikely collaboration

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Jan Vogler and Bill Murray both have Pittsburgh connections, the cellist having performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the comedian having been a former TV weatherman here who had to cover a groundhog.

“That was ‘Groundhog Day,’ of course,” the actor-comedian says in phone interview, “but I also made a movie there called ‘Kingpin,’ a bowling movie. That was there, too. I had a good time in Pittsburgh.”

The visit to Pittsburgh on Saturday, at Downtown’s Heinz Hall, showcases their unlikely collaboration on the project Bill Murray, Jan Vogler & Friends, which topped the classical music charts with “New Worlds,” an album that finds the former “Saturday Night Live” star reading poetry, literature and singing everything from “I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair” to “I Feel Pretty” from “West Side Story.”

The collaboration began with strangers on a plane — flying Air Berlin from Germany to Newark, N.J., in 2013.

“There was this guy walking with this funny-looking box,” Mr. Murray says. “And I was curious, and I said, ‘Are you going to be able to fit that thing into the overhead?’ And he looked at me like I was a dog chasing my tail and said, ‘It has its own seat.’

“And not only did it have its own seat, it had its own seat in first class and it had the window seat, so it had a better seat than Jan did and a better seat than I got on that particular flight.

“So, we’re on this one-of-us-is-smart, one-of us-isn’t kind of trip.”

Then came the bonding experience in the form of a fellow passenger, a woman, having an airline panic incident.

“The crew didn’t seem to be up to handling her,” Mr. Murray says, “so we just sort of looked at each other and, you know, gotta do something, so we started playing with her, and uh, Jan has more interesting hair than I do, so I think that was part of what calmed her down. Jan, is that what it was? Your hair?”

“I think it was complementary,” he says. “I had the right pills and you had more humor than me.”

“I had no pills,” the comedian says. “I just want to make that clear.”

Mr. Vogler, by the way, didn’t know who this wisecracking character was in first class, but he says, “He had a big aura, and when you’re at the airport in the morning, sleepy, and something rings a bell, you don’t really analyze.”

“I wanna say. I didn’t know who Jan was either,” Mr. Murray says. “Just a guy with interesting hair and a box that got its own seat.”

Mr. Vogler is a prestigious New York cellist who has performed with orchestras all over the world, but he likely wouldn’t be recognizable to the casual classical music fan, which Mr. Murray claims to be.

“I like classical music OK,” he says. “I used to listen to it in the bathtub. I used to think that made me more intelligent, that if I was in repose, if I was very relaxed in the bathtub listening to classical music, that it would go deep into me and make me more intelligent and more appreciative, more sensitive.”

We can all stir up that image of Bill Murray, likely wearing a porkpie hat.

The Air Berlin flight led to a correspondence between the two artists while Mr. Murray was shuffling between New York and Germany working on the movie “The Monuments Men.”

“Jan said he was going back to Dresden to do a show there, with orchestra and automobile parts,” the comedian says. “And he invited me to go. I was working in the middle of Germany, and at the end of the workday, I said to the Teamster fellow I had, ‘How far is it to Dresden?’ And he said, ‘Two hours.’ And I said, ‘OK, would you mind driving me to Dresden?’ He said, ‘Sure.’ I didn’t realize Dresden was 260 miles away, so to get there, and he did get there, he was driving 130 miles per hour, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m really gonna go to a show for orchestra and automobile parts — and I’m gonna die.’ “

It was the New York Philharmonic, Mr. Vogler and Joshua Bell in a Volkswagen factory, “and every once in a while,” Mr. Murray explains, “there’d be a percussion part with somebody picking up a car fender and smacking it, all kinds of noises being made by the factory parts.”

It ended with a car rolling off the factory line.

In any case, the correspondence led to a friendship, going to concerts, movie premieres and even the gym together. Then, in spring 2016, the cellist saw him recite a Walt Whitman poem at a poetry gala.

“After I heard a lot of poets read poetry, Bill’s interpretation stood out by so far. It was so brilliant, and I had seen ‘The Jungle Book,’ the movie where Bill sings, with a New Orleans band, so I thought, ‘I’ve seen him singing, and I heard him recite this poem, I think we can do a show together and go around the world.’ Bill, you should say what you said in the text.”

“I’m having the same issues with memory as I am with time,” says Mr. Murray, who had struggled with when they met. “I don’t remember what I said in the text. What did I say in the text?”

“You said you would love it. We didn’t know how far it would go, we just wanted to create something.”

Mr. Vogler did most of the heavy lifting, creatively.

“All I did was nod my head,” Mr. Murray says. “He had a big stack of books, it was all American literature, and he said, ‘What do you think of these?’ I said they were great. He really thought the creative cutting edge of the 20th century resided in America, and he wanted to express that in the form of something of a realization and gratitude for being free after having grown up in communist East Berlin, to be free in New York City and be able to walk down the street and get himself a bagel and shmear.

“Jan wanted to express an American show. I happened to be American. That was the only reason I was invited. They needed one American. They had three commies. They’ve got Vanessa Perez from Venezuela, Mira Wang [Mr. Vogler’s wife] from Peking and Jan from East Berlin, and I’m sort of their cover. I get them through the door, they check my ID, and I say, ‘These three are with me.’ It’s really worked out well — for them.”

When Mr. Murray would come to the house to rehearse, the cellist says, “He would sing every melody I would mention. He could sing or whistle. So I thought this man has a much larger repertoire of melodies than me, so we can tear down the border between classical music and popular music and make people understand that music is music.”

When most people think of Bill Murray singing they don’t think of Baloo the bear