“We are the best jazz you’ve ever heard…”
Maria Schneider has given an interview to Michael J. West for the January/February edition of Jazz Times, regarding working with David Bowie on Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime).
Titled: David Bowie and Maria Schneider’s Enigmatic Collaboration, the article/interview discusses the creation of the track, from inception to completion. Here’s an excerpt…
The two worked closely together, exchanging and trying out new ideas—but freely rejecting them as well. “He was very good at saying, ‘No, I don’t like that. Yes, I love that.’ And that made it really easy, that he didn’t hem and haw around things he didn’t like,” says Schneider. The music came first; the words followed and reshaped the music around them. The opposite was also true, with Bowie’s final lyrics adapted to what he and Schneider had written. Schneider and Bowie then called in the orchestra’s rhythm section to workshop the tune—along with McCaslin and Keberle, whom Bowie had handpicked to solo. After further refinement they went into the studio in July. It took only a few takes, with the band laying down their parts before Bowie added the vocal; Schneider had imagined that he would sing in between the orchestral figures she had arranged, but his delivery instead crossed bar lines and overlapped organically with the ensemble. “It was kind of mind-blowing,” she says. “He automatically heard the unexpected.”
Read the full online version over at JazzTimes.com