Music: Donnie and Bowie, a young jazzman's contribution to the pop legend's swan song

- from The Guardian

Nine months have passed since David Bowie’s death, but his last collaborator, Donny McCaslin, still has to pause when he talks about it. “There’s so much emotion,” McCaslin says, the words catching in his throat. “It’s devastating.”

McCaslin speaks about his experience with Bowie sitting in 55 Bar, the micro Greenwich Village jazz club where Bowie first heard the musician perform back in 2014. Shortly after seeing that show, Bowie chose McCaslin’s band to back him on his final album, the acclaimed, jazz-fusion leaning Blackstar.

McCaslin vividly remembers the night Bowie came to the club to check him out. “I was definitely nervous,” the saxophonist said. “I glanced up and saw where he was sitting. I just tried to keep myself grounded and not think about it. But the pressure was on.”
Even so, McCaslin says his band “were going for it. It wasn’t a watered-down version of what we do. Afterwards Bowie said: ‘Wow, that was really loud!’”


Clearly, he liked it that way, because a few days later, Bowie emailed the musician to ask if his band would work with him on what would be his last release, an album that turned out to be one of his most adventurous. The experience of creating music with Bowie proved so deep, and its aftermath so jarring, that McCaslin decided to turn his new album, Beyond Now, out 14 October, into a tribute. It includes several transformative covers of Bowie songs, including Warszawa from Low, and A Small Plot of Land from Outside, along with a song McCaslin wrote inspired by a piece Bowie left off Blackstar. (That track, plus two other cuts that didn’t make that release, will come out on 21 October on the cast album from the musical Bowie wrote in his last year, Lazarus).

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McCaslin knew his Bowie salute had to be special. “I wanted the depth of my experience with him, and the impact on my life, to be reflected,” he said. “I was digging deep on every take to get the gravitas I felt it should have.”


For Blackstar, that meant giving McCaslin’s band nearly free rein. “He set the tone from the beginning,” the saxophonist said. “He told us: ‘Whatever you hear, I want you to go with it.’ He said ‘great’ to everything.”
At the same time, McCaslin couldn’t tell anyone outside of his immediate family about the project. Bowie had the band sign non-disclosure agreements, the better to keep the album a secret until he was ready to release it. At the same time, Bowie was aware he had cancer, which was an even more closely guarded secret. McCaslin politely demurs when asked if he knew the star was sick during the recording process. “He was so private,” he said. “I want to honor his wishes that we not talk about it.”

At the time, McCaslin wasn’t even sure the music he cut with Bowie would come out or, if it did, how much of his band’s efforts would make the ultimate cut. It wasn’t until late last fall, when a British journalist asked to interview the musician for a story about a new Bowie album, that he found out about its impending release and heard its final form.

On 8 January, Blackstar finally appeared. Two days later came news of Bowie’s death and, suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to McCaslin. “I wasn’t prepped,” he said. “I didn’t know what to say.”
He gave a few interviews, talking only about the music. Then, journalists started to get nosier about the details of Bowie’s illness and demise, and McCaslin shut down. He also began to fully experience his grief. “We had this amazing connection,” he said, “and then he was gone.”

Music: Black Curtains, Purple Rain, RIP Prince, 1958-2016

-from Fast Company

Prince died today. That alone probably has you digging through your record collection and/or iTunes playlists to tear through Sign o' the Times andAround the World in a Day—and all number of tributes to the importance of Prince as an icon have already been crafted in response to the Artist’s death. And while we’re certainly sitting at our keyboards having just changed clothes so we’re dressed head-to-toe in purple and figuring out where exactly to get our "Love Symbol" tattoos as we reflect on what having drawn breath at the same time, on the same planet, as one of the most vital and transformative pop culture figures in memory—we’re also remembering that in addition to what he meant as a personality, he was also maybe the best guitar player to ever live.

Photo: Richard E. Aaron, Redferns, Getty Images

That’s tall praise, of course, but don’t take our word for it: Eric Clapton, who would certainly be in the discussion for that title, bestowed it upon him in an interview (the sourcing of which may be apocryphal, but what kind of monster would bring that up today, of all days), when, after being asked the question, "What’s it like to be the best guitar player alive," he responded, "I don’t know, ask Prince." His prowess on the guitar is legendary. Sheryl Crow, who collaborated with him on the Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic album in the late ’90’s, told Billboard that "I’ve heard him play piano like Chick Corea or Herbie Hancock, move over to bass and play like Larry Graham, then play guitar like Jimi Hendrix or Buddy Guy."

But the definitive proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and holy cow, what pudding it is. (Or whatever metaphor is appropriate—we’re in mourning.) Prince’s performance at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 might be the definitive confirmation of his absolute brilliance as a guitar player. While inducting George Harrison, he participated in a supergroup including Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, and Jeff Lynne, and emerged to transform the rendition of "While My Guitar Gently" from a nice tribute to the Beatle into a transcendent, utterly magical experience with a solo that stretched well over two minutes and made even the legendary talent on the stage with him seem like they were lucky to just be in the same room as the guy.

Prince didn’t just drop in on the performances of his fellow rock heroes like a guitar-slinging angel in order to demonstrate his virtuosity—but even at his own headline performances, he was fundamentally collaborative. That was on display in 2007, when he played the Super Bowl halftime show in Miami. The entire performance was epic in ways that befit the legend, but which couldn’t possibly be planned—Prince emerged to a downpour unprecedented in Super Bowl history (production designer Bruce Rodgers recalls that, when asked if he was okay to play in the rain, Prince asked "Can you make it rain harder?") and performed a stunning medley. That medley didn’t just include his own hits, though—he also played a version of "All Along The Watchtower" that took the bluesiness of Hendrix and turned it into something that all of America wanted to hear, then seemingly randomly picked then-current Foo Fighters hit "The Best of You" to play, with a solo that presumably made Dave Grohl feel about two feet tall. Still, the performance of "Purple Rain" that night probably contained the most compelling Super Bowl halftime show moment in history (sorry, Left Shark)—when, as a marching band decked out in neon surrounded him, he asked the world, "Can I play this guitar?" then began to shred as his silhouette was blown up and projected to an audience of almost a hundred thousand people in the stadium, and tens of millions around the world.

Those latter-day Prince moments display plenty of Prince’s talent, but it’s not something he waited to unveil until the 2000s. Those were massive cultural moments that Prince somehow made bigger with his guitar and his very presence—but for pete’s sake, check out this display from a January 1982 show at the Capitol Theatre during "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?" Prince keeps the guitar behind his back for the first three minutes of the song, then slings it forward at about the 3:15 mark, blisters through the song’s next minute like he’s possessed—down on his knees, back to back with his backing band, and utterly captivating.

Basically going through any live Prince performance will find you similar moments, and his own recorded discography will turn up plenty more. Dude opened "When Doves Cry" with a 10-second guitar solo before the track even really gets started, and the recorded version of everything from "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man" to friggin’ "Batdance" has at least one "how the hell can anybody be that good?" guitar moment in it. (None of those recordings are available on YouTube, Spotify, or other streaming services, because Prince declared the Internet "over" in 2010, and was able to create a reality for himself where that was true.) His collection of guitars was legendary, from the "cloud guitar" to the surprisingly large number of guitars built to resemble his Love Symbol. While the world lost an iconic cultural figure who taught us a lot about different ways to perform masculinity, the importance of being funky, and how to be a sexy motherfucker—it also lost one of the finest musicians to pick up a guitar, and a creative force we’re unlikely to see paralleled in the near future.