“Killing a Little Time”… until Saturday’s exclusive Donny McCaslin interview!
This Saturday, I’ll be posting my new interview with Donny McCaslin, the saxophonist who led the band on Blackstar and helped shape Bowie’s final musical vision.
Starting today and continuing through the week, I’ll be featuring songs that showcase Donny McCaslin’s work. The challenge for this blog is what to choose. Blackstar is known and beloved—not just by Bowie fans, but by music fans more broadly. The album has appeared high on multiple “best of” lists—not just “best of Bowie,” but also best album of 2016, of the 2010s, and of all time. Late last year, for instance, Uncut magazine ranked it #6 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time—placing it ahead of Low, which came in at #10. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone ranked Blackstar at #24 on its quarter-century-in-review list, “The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far.”
The album is central to what Donny and I discuss in the upcoming interview. It is as much a Donny McCaslin album as a Bowie album, and in fact I’d argue that it sounds more similar to other work from Donny than Bowie. The problem is that I’m pretty sure that anyone reading this blog knows and loves the album already. So, while every song on it features Donny and the musicians he assembled, I’m gonna guess that you already know that.
Still, I wanted to kick off Donny McCaslin week with something he did with Bowie, so I’m featuring the less-well-known, “Killing A Little Time,” originally written for the Lazarus soundtrack, but also recorded by Bowie for the posthumous EP, No Plan. (Indeed, I think the song is slightly more obscure than the EP’s title track, for which a video exists).
Though Donny’s sax is not the highlight of this song, his presence is felt and the diversity of his talents are highlighted. The Bowie Bible credits him with playing sax, flute and clarinet.
In his blog, Pushing Ahead of the Dame, Bowie chronicler Chris O’Leary quotes Donny recalling that “it was always this angry, pissed off-song.” To capture that intensity, Donny scored new horn parts and, as he told Mojo, “harmoniz[ed] them in this dark way.” He and Bowie also drew from Maria Schneider’s 2014 arrangement of “Sue (or In a Season of Crime).” In our interview, I asked Donny about how the path to Blackstar goes through Schneider.
To my ears the song sounds less like “Sue” and more like something off 1. Outside. Perhaps its the lyrics— they sound like something Algeria Touchshreik might have said about himself:
I’m falling, man
I’m choking, man
I’m fading, man
And broke and blind
I’m falling, man
I’m choking, man
I’m fading, man
Actually, the song echoes any number of Bowie’s musical expressions of personal entropy. Someone made the point that had Bowie died right after Aladdin Sane in 1973, that, rather than Blackstar would be viewed as Bowie’s death-album.
O’Leary points out that you can hear Donny’s influence in the woodwind arrangement during the song’s second verse. For both organizational and tonal ideas, Donny also looked to Bowie’s favorite of Schneider’s compositions, “Dance You Monster to My Soft Song” (1994)—a piece that, McCaslin said, helped him “get inside of [‘Killing’] a little bit.”
Anyway, of actual Bowie songs on which Donny McCaslin played, I’m rolling the dice that this is the one with which you might be least familiar. In coming days I will feature two adaptations of Bowie songs from Donny’s album, Beyond Now.
And stay tuned. The interview goes live Saturday.