The recording and release of David Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, now seems almost as momentous as the singer’s quiet and dignified death just days later.

Donny McCaslin – Blow
Motéma Music

Zeena Parkins – Thinking in Stitches
Case Study Records

The recording and release of David Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, now seems almost as momentous as the singer’s quiet and dignified death just days later. The group that accompanied Bowie in those last sessions has undergone a transformation in visibility almost unimaginable in creative music, as if saxophonist Donny McCaslin, keyboardist Jason Lindner, bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Mark Guiliana were apostles carrying on a posthumous message.

Bowie had come to see McCaslin’s jazz group at a New York club in 2014, prior to recording an orchestral track that would be released as the single “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)”. The following spring, the quartet plus a couple of associates joined Bowie to make what is one of the most talked-about rock/post-rock albums of the last decade.

McCaslin admits that the experience could have been intimidating, but told me that he reassured himself with the thought that, while the music on Blackstar was unambiguously Bowie’s, “it was me he wanted, me and the others, and not anyone else”. The effect on McCaslin’s career has been electrifying.

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