Part of this is due to his collaboration with an avant-garde jazz group, led by Grammy-nominated saxophonist Donny McCaslin, which serves as Bowie's backing band on Blackstar. He's even unafraid to get a little smooth on "I Can't Give Everything Away," a quantum leap from his 2013 album, The Next Day, that pays off. Bowie's appreciation for jazz is peppered throughout his extensive catalog, from the saxophone crooning alongside Ziggy Stardust's "Soul Love" to pianist Mike Garson's flourishes on "Aladdin Sane" and his collaborations with fellow jazz freak (but not relative) Lester Bowie, the trumpeter, on his 1993 album Black Tie White Noise.īlackstar indeed booms with saxophone solos, notably in the lucid-dream-like "Dollar Days" and the rollicking "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore." But Bowie also delves into a new world where shadowy jazz probes funk, noise and rock with panache. As a teenager at Bromley Technical School in the early 1960s, he learned how to play the plastic alto saxophone (a gift from his mother) after his half brother, Terry Burns, introduced him to John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. But Bowie's dalliances with the genre aren't necessarily new-they extend far back to when he still went by the name Davie Jones. Giovanni ends up stabbing Annabella in the heart, and a cardinal shrugs and says-you guessed it-"'tis pity she's a whore." The tale is immortalized in the twinkling, percussion-heavy Blackstar number titled "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore." Here, Bowie takes on a much more punishing role as who we presume is Giovanni, explicitly talking about castration, chalking it up to "fate, I suppose." Experimental JazzĬritics are praising Bowie's paradigm-shifting Blackstar for challenging the confines of jazz with an experimental backing band. The play, one of the most contentious of its time, centers on the incestuous (and doomed) affair between siblings Giovanni and Annabella. Club notes, he name-checks an unusual 17th-century theatrical work on Blackstar: John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. 17th-Century Tragic Theaterīowie's interest in theatrics is well documented, including with his new off-Broadway play Lazarus. Here's an unofficial guide to the ones that have stood out to us upon release day. Hybrid slang, funky beats inspired by Kendrick Lamar and fascinations with fallen men are but a few themes that get fully realized on Blackstar. Given the record's cosmic symbolism, Bowie's interest in the cosmos, the release of the interplanetary short film for the album's title track and the collaboration with an experimental jazz group reminiscent of Exploding Star Orchestra, it's easy to surmise that Blackstar is a space oddity for the Information Age.īut there's a lot more to the shimmering Blackstar than it seems at first blush. David Bowie turns 69 years old today, and he's given the world a present: his 28th album, ★ (pronounced Blackstar).
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