The boldness of that record is really astonishing." Bowie gave us something great to work with. Gershon had to be convinced to take on the project himself: first because he couldn't shake his sadness about Bowie's passing, and then because he wasn't sure he could do the task justice.īut after listening to "Blackstar" enough times, he said, "I got past the crushing weight of it, and into the reverse-engineering of the music. "But he's become really quite entranced." "I'm not sure how much of Bowie's music he'd heard," said Gershon.
The jazz and blues singer Ron Murphy, for instance, initially agreed to sing lead on the prescient postmortem "Lazarus." Once hooked, however, he threw himself into learning parts for the gospel chorus that helps bring the entire album to life. "Feel good?"īut at least a few of the performers taking on "Blackstar" - an experimental work of avant-jazz art-rock - are coming to Bowie with fresh ears. When he climbed inside the tight ring of musicians to croon " 'Tis Pity She Was a Whore," Gershon joked that Dante was entering "the torture chamber."Īs they finished a near-flawless take, Gershon looked pleased.
Gene Dante, who leads the glam band the Future Starlets, is doing double duty with the Bowie "hits" band and as one of the featured vocalists in the "Blackstar" set. It's safe to say the BRO musicians re-creating "Ziggy Stardust" and the greatest hits playlist are Bowie fanatics. "There wasn't anybody in my sphere who didn't have strong feelings about Bowie." "He was a huge influence on me, and all of us who started the BRO originally," Ramsay said while awaiting the start of a rehearsal at Gershon's Somerville warehouse space. When he died, Bowie was memorialized as a consummate performer whose many stylistic pivots encouraged his fans with a simple message: Be who you want to be. Mick Mondo (who is Ramsay's husband), will lead a second band covering the classic album "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars." And guitarist Matt Sullivan will front a third group, set to play hits spanning Bowie's half-century career.
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