Tulip Frenzy

Just as he surprised us in 2013 with the release of The Next Day, we were stunned last week to hear the first track off of Blackstar, to be released on January 8th, Bowie’s 69th birthday.  Imagine if Station To Station were recorded with Weather Report, or if Young Americans had Wayne Shorter, not David Sanborn, on sax, and you’ll get a sense of what the amazing 9:57 long title track sounds like.

“Darkstar” is a beautifully contained suite broken into a prelude and a soulful back half, with Bowie’s voice having never sounding better.  With Tony Visconti producing, the band in the studio is essentially the same set of musicians Donny McCaslin used on his 2012 Casting For Gravity, and starting with McCaslin himself on woodwinds, these are as flexible a set of jazz fusion musicians as could possibly exist in the current century.  We cannot stop listening to it, and cannot wait until the album is released in the new year.

This entry was posted on November 27, 2015 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags "Blackstar", David Bowie, Donny McCaslin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.