Blackstar at 10: Band leader Donny McCaslin on Bowie’s final chapter

A decade on, I speak to the saxophonist and band leader about working with David – and the indelible impression the man left on his own music

Jan 06, 2026

What must it be like to work with one of the icons of the music world? On a record that would become a masterstroke farewell, no less?

Donny McCaslin has been asked versions of this question countless times since Blackstar landed back in January 2016. A talented saxophonist, Donny and his group are a force to be reckoned with; fierce improvisational players, they’ve spent years creating music with little interest in the guard rails of genre.

In the new documentary David Bowie: The Final Act, long-time producer Tony Visconti describes each of them as a “virtuoso – they don’t make mistakes”.

Donny played no small part in bringing Blackstar to life, working closely with Bowie, his band, and Visconti to develop this sequence of seven hypnotic art-rock tracks. Ultimately, what came out of that small New York studio became one of the greatest David Bowie records, standing tall alongside Low, Heroes, and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars.

When I called Donny for our scheduled conversation, the New York City resident was holed up somewhere warm during a blustery winter afternoon, just in time to mark the ten-year anniversary of – I’m sure he would agree – the most consequential project he’s ever worked on.

He talked to me about his experience in the studio working with David on the Blackstar songs, and the indelible impression the Starman imprinted on him and his art.

Before I jump in, we’re celebrating a decade of Blackstar for the next Listening Club session. I’ll be running it next Thursday (15th) at 9pm GMT – if you want to join us, click the image below to sign up as a paid subscriber. For just £4.50 a month, you’ll also get access to Friday’s exclusive posts, subscriber-only videos, and loads more.

“Seeing more and feeling less, saying no but meaning yes. This is all I ever meant, that's the message that I sent.”

So croons David Bowie on 'I Can’t Give Everything Away’, the finale of his last ever record. It’s a song that still makes Blackstar’s producer Tony Visconti emotional to this day.

“He’s talking about the disease”, Visconti recounts in David Bowie: The Final Act. “It would be like the worst thing in the world to tell people he was ill. Elvis wouldn’t have done it, the Beatles wouldn’t have done it.”

When Bowie walked into the studio for the first session in early 2015, he removed his hat in front of Donny and the band to reveal the effects of the chemotherapy on his body. He had already been battling aggressive liver cancer for some time, a fact he and his family had somehow managed to keep from the rest of the world.

“Given what he knew about his own health, I think he wanted to make the best album of his life”, Visconti continues in the documentary.

Two days after the release of Blackstar, the news of his death shocked the entire world – most of us were only beginning to process this strange and brilliant record, for it to be suddenly cast in a new light altogether.

The lyricism of tracks like ‘Lazarus’ became pregnant with allusion and meaning, words that reached out from beyond the plane of mortality to his legions of fans.

“Look up here, I’m in heaven.” It’s difficult to hear that as anything but a message from beyond, spoken by a figure straddling the gulf between life and death.

Despite this now mythic creation story, Bowie had actually been planning to get back into the studio, and even perform a few tracks live in January 2016. It’s a kernel of information Blackstar’s band leader, Donny McCaslin, has offered a few times since Bowie’s death. Does that undermine the ‘parting farewell’ mythos of the record, if he was planning to release more music?

“Over the years I’ve done many interviews talking about the record, and, of course, many people have asked about the lyrical content” Donny explained to me. “From my background as an improvising musician, I just feel emotion. Throughout that period of making Blackstar, I was reacting more to his emotional output when he was singing – the conviction, the passion. I was interacting with that more so than looking at the lyrics, analysing them, and trying to figure out what the meaning of the songs were.

“For me, we were in this together, in the moment, and we were having a conversation.“

Donny first came into Bowie’s orbit through mutual collaborator Maria Schneider, who worked on the original version of ‘Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)’ in 2014. Schneider rang Donny one day and delivered some words he’s likely to never forget.

“She called and said, ‘hey, I played David your album Casting for Gravity, and told him you should do something with him.’ I was shocked, and, of course, honoured and touched that she had felt compelled to do that.”

Bowie turned up at the now-closed 55 Bar in Greenwich Village to watch Donny and his band perform. They didn’t speak that night, but shortly after were officially introduced during the recording of that original ‘Sue’ track.

Before he knew it, Donny and the rest of his band – Tim Lefebvre, Jason Lindner, and Mark Guiliana – were heading into the studio with Bowie and Tony Visconti.

There aren’t many of us lucky enough to find ourselves in the presence of a creative who has defined swathes of our collective culture, and everything I’ve read about Bowie suggests he possessed a kind-hearted nature and generosity towards his collaborators.

Donny’s experience affirmed that notion: “I think he was somebody who was utterly present, you know? When I was with him, you felt the warmth of his humanity; he was humble, I could tell that he was somebody who lived in art.

“He was just a wonderful person, I really enjoyed being around him and interacting with him.”

Throughout their time together in the New York studio, Bowie encouraged Donny and the band to feel around the edges of his Blackstar demos to see what felt right. The fact that the quartet already had an established working relationship meant the chemistry didn’t need to be unlocked, it was already there. If you’ve performed with musicians yourself, you might have experienced that intangible sense of being in step with another person. It’s like telepathy, and there are few better feelings as a performer. Donny described the atmosphere on the first day as a “natural cohesion”.

“He said, ‘Donny, I just want you to do whatever you're hearing, and don't feel like it has to sit in this genre, or that genre. Just go for it, just feel free and let's have fun’.

“He really set the table before we played a note, this table of absolute trust in us and the freedom for us to engage in our creativity and bring everything that we thought was appropriate to the floor.”

He added: “I would say you can’t ask for a more creative environment.”

The seven tracks that make up Blackstar still sound as unearthly as they did on release. The songs are frequently challenging from a melodic perspective, inviting dissonance and tension from both Bowie’s voice and the band. Some of this came from the carefully-crafted demos Bowie brought to the sessions, but in other places the quartet added their improvisational flourishes to widen his vision.

Listening to it again all these years later, I’m reminded of how much Donny’s saxophone lines appear to be duetting with Bowie’s vocals. It seems clearer with each relisten – a subtle melodic dance between the two voices.

At other points, his saxophone sounds as if it’s delivering Bowie’s voice, guiding it to some unreachable plane. “On the song ‘Lazarus’, I remember being in my sax booth looking straight ahead, and David’s in front of the booth singing,” Donny said. “We were tracking it, I was hearing his voice and imagining my saxophone as a kind of pillow around his voice, supporting it.

“It was a clear image to me at the time, and a really emotional feeling.”

‘Lazarus’ is one of the most straightforwardly emotive tracks on the record, a bleakness teased out by collaborator Ben Monder’s crunchy guitar chords.

Elsewhere, a propulsive energy and creeping tension seeps from the music. The reworked ‘Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)’ is a brooding track locked into Mark Guiliana’s fluctuating groove. Around the three-minute mark, Bowie utters this bruised wail of ‘Sue, goodbye’, holding the note as the band reacts and builds to an intense drum and bass break.

Rather than being a carefully orchestrated moment, Donny explains it was one of organic spontaneity: “It was a moment of pure improvisation to me, where David does what a lot of us jazz improvisers do; to create tension by playing in another key.

“He holds it and then the band just goes fucking nuts; it was a really exciting moment because he’s really going for it and the band is responding.”

Bowie was no slouch with his involvement in the production process, either. Donny returned to the studio months later to perform some overdubs, and Bowie was still excitedly ideating with Visconti on ways to capture the final flourishes of his songs.

“David opens the door to my little room and puts a cheap mic on the floor outside the room, and they record me that way. Then he’s talking to Tony and saying ‘remember when we did this on such and such session’, which was great. There were moments like that which happened during Blackstar where they’re referencing their shared history, which is rock ‘n’ roll history.”

In November of 2015, Donny was invited to David’s apartment to hear the finished record for the first time.

Having been out of the studio for months, he didn’t quite know what to expect – what would the final overdubs, mixing and mastering have done to that original sound? Closing his eyes to experience one of the songs, he eventually opens them to see David standing there with his assistant, Coco.

“It was a heavy moment, you know... we embraced, it was such a powerful moment, and one thing I remember distinctly was that he was so happy with the record. Obviously he had heard it countless times at that point, so for him to still feel that cherubic excitement? I was so touched by that.”

They talked about getting back in the recording studio in the new year, and Bowie joining him at the Village Vanguard in January for a short performance.

It was the last time they saw each other.

Two days after Blackstar stunned the music world, the news broke that he died. Like many of you probably can, I remember exactly where I was when I heard. I was listening to ‘Lazarus’ at the time, having played the record on a loop all weekend. A collective loss was felt across the world, in a way that only happens with the most revered public figures.

For Donny, his experience working with Bowie has left an indelible print on his work ever since.

Last year, he toured the Blackstar Symphony in the US; as artistic director of the project, he brought together Bowie collaborators – including Tony Visconti and Maria Schneider – to reinterpret the music of the 2016 record, backed by a 65-piece orchestra.

The concept came from Donny working on a project with Jules Buckley and the Metropole Orkest, which saw them perform an orchestral version of ‘Warszawa’ from 1977’s Low.

Donny said: “To reimagine it for orchestra where you have all these possibilities of expanding the work, bringing the DNA of the record to life, but also having this chance to really open up different sections, take chances, and have some unexpected moments? That felt really exciting.”

It’s an ever-evolving show, one which Donny says will hopefully make its way to Europe in the not-too distant future.

His latest studio record was also something of a Blackstar throwback, delivering him and his band back to that period they spent in the studio in 2015.

Lullaby for the Lost is an eclectic collection of art-rock jazz fusion tracks, a brilliant example of how Donny’s music treads its own eclectic path. The sound isn’t that of Blackstar, though a number of the tracks possess a similar spiritual darkness to Bowie’s final record.

For its collaborators, being back in the studio together was a beautiful reminder of those sessions more than a decade ago, particularly during the recording of the Lullaby for the Lost title track.

“As we [Donny and Tim Lefebvre] listened back in the studio, we both looked at each other and started laughing – the feeling really brought both of us back to ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, when Ben [Monder] starts soloing at the end of the song.”

“Blackstar was such a transformative moment for all of us involved, and it was very transformative for me as a person, and also as a musician. The way it has influenced my life has been pretty profound since then – it hasn’t always been a straight line, but it comes up in different ways.”

You can listen to and purchase all of Donny McCaslin’s music on Bandcamp.