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to make the ‘Outside’ album so he could snap back to himself. And we successfully did that and continued touring for at least the next 10 years.”

Bowie was always “extremely” interested in his jazz background, Garson says.

“We had a lot in common. But I was respectful, a little naïve, thinking, ‘I don’t have very much to offer here because it’s not my comfort zone.’ And that’s not what was in his mind. He wanted me to share everything I knew and ultimately he was able to pull it out of me like a casting director.”

The same was true of everyone in Bowie’s orbit.

“He had that ability,” Garson said. “Every musician that he ever hired was the perfect musician at the time for him, be it Carlos Alomar or Earl Slick, Mick Ronson or Adrian Belew or Robert Fripp. I played in maybe 13 bands with him and I never played in a bad band.”

As to how he became his employer’s most frequent collaborator, Garson says, “I think it was that our creative processes were very similar. That’s something that goes deeper than your personalities. Our creative process consisted of loving a lot of styles of music, of not sitting in a comfort zone, of continuously stretching the limits. And we didn’t have to talk about it. It just was a telepathic transmission, I suspect.”

The last time Garson played with Bowie was his final live performance at an AIDS event in 2006, performing “Changes” (the song he played at his audition) with Alicia Keys.

Their last communication was by email. Garson had been asked by a biographer to go through and listen to 55 tracks he’d recorded with Bowie and write about each track.

“I have to say,” Garson says, “I was mesmerized. Like ‘Holy mackerel!’ I instantly wrote David and I said, ‘My God, this stuff is great.’ And within seconds, he wrote back. This was three months before he passed. He said, ‘Mike, we did a great body of work together.’ I said to my wife, ‘I think this is the last time I’m gonna hear from him.’ It was so final.”