Around the music community of New York, his home since 1999, he’s known as Jack Spann. In St. Louis, many more will remember him as Jon Rosen, a Webster University grad who gigged in all kinds of band-and-solo contexts throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In both places, he’s known as a keyboardist of unusual range and skill, able to play on pretty much any project offered.
His talents have landed him a variety of gigs over the years, but he wasn’t able to discuss one of them until recently. Even now, he’s contractually (and, to some degree, ethically) unable to tell the entire story of a three-days-and-change gig in 2014.
The short version: Spann played with David Bowie during the run-up to the rock legend’s final album, the magnificent Blackstar.
“A mutual friend introduced me to Tony Visconti, maybe April or May of 2014,” Spann says, citing Bowie’s frequent producer and arranger. “He’d gone to my site, I guess, and then called me one day, out of the blue. ‘We need a piano player who can play jazz, can play rock, but not jazz-rock. We don’t want Chick Corea.’ He and Bowie had been listening to a lot of Stan Kenton, the white Thelonious Monk. I called him back and went into the studio the next morning.”
There, Spann recalls, “This guy walked up to me at 9:55 a.m. ‘Hello, Jack, I’m David. We’re going to have a great time.’ ‘Oh, hi David.’ Really, it’s hard to describe how nice he was to me. He was really, really genuinely interested in how and what I was playing. Very supportive, and he had a lot of suggestions. Overall, he was just a f______ delight to work with.”
At this point in our conversation, we pause for a moment, as Spann thinks about what he can share, could share, shouldn’t share. After conversations with some involved in the sessions, he’s able to broadly discuss the experience and, when prompted, the unique, star-crossed feeling it’s left him with. Even in our half-hour conversation by phone, Spann walking across New York City en route to the subway, we pause multiple times for him to consider phrasings and tone.
“I can’t share too many details,” he says. “I’m bursting with details about it that I can’t really share. On the other hand, I’ve been dying to tell somebody. I couldn’t breathe a word about it to anybody. [The job] lasted for 3.5 days, nine hours a day. I told my wife, and I eventually told a few people this year. I know in the larger scheme of things, that it’s not that big of a deal. For me, though, Bowie was my all-time Rock God. Just meeting him, sitting next to him for three days, interacting him with on music… I just have to tell this.”
He does say that he doesn’t know whether Bowie was aware of the cancer that took his life earlier this year and he doesn’t want to even speculate on that. And that he was brought in to help flesh out demos that would be eventually wind up on Blackstar, with Visconti on bass and Zack Alford in drums during those sessions.
As has been widely reported, Bowie’s album veered dramatically from past work, as he didn’t ultimately include many of his most trusted and tested support players, instead deciding to bring in a band of already-gigging jazz players for the spine of the recording process, including saxophonist Donny McCaslin, keyboardist Jason Lindner, bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Mark Guiliana. There’s no doubt that their individual abilities and cohesion as a group helps influence the very particular sound of Blackstar.
It’s album that Spann owns. Though his relationship to it… well, it’s complicated.
“I listened to it once,” he says, honestly. “And I also heard it at somebody else’s house. I find it really hard to listen to… I just need some distance from it. It was a big deal to me [to work on the demos]. I was in shock when I heard they’d hired a band. I was in shock when I’d heard that he died. I don’t have any opinion on the songs. Some of them sound familiar, from being in the studio, though not all of them.”
That’s not to say that doesn’t appreciate what those demo days mean.
“I feel so privileged,” he says of the experience. “Even though it didn’t go any further. It’s amazing. It’s not a life-changing event, necessarily. It’s just a really cool thing to be able to tell people. That I sat next to David and to Tony as he played bass and worked out parts. Tony and David both gave me praise and tips. It was pretty, pretty cool, you know?”
Spann hopes to be back in St. Louis within the next two months, playing here in either April or May. He has a new album, Time, Time, Time, Time, Time. And he has another in the can, recorded at Birdhouse Studio in Seattle, with percussionist Rob Medcalf. There’s enough work in New York to keep him busy and new challenges seem to find their way to him.
The feeling of being able to address his sessions with Bowie, he says, gives him a sense of relief, especially as he has old friends ask, “‘What have you been doing these last few years?’”
Bowie’s life, especially in recent years, was a private affair. He wanted it that way, and people were respectful of that, collaborators even having to sign off on confidentiality agreements about their interactions. Online, there are those fans who’ve criticized musicians who’ve now spoken of their times with Bowie. But the intense interest around his work belies a deep-seated desire to want to know more, hear more, understand more. Tribute shows continue (in St. Louis, sure, and worldwide) and the artist’s albums and streaming plays are at all-time highs. It’s an interesting time, in short, to be a musician who had a short series of days with the legend.
Spann says that he didn’t cry upon hearing of Bowie’s death, as he had when John Lennon died, for example. There was more a sense of shock, followed by appreciation.
“I’ll be forever grateful,” he says.
And, again, this gig wasn’t any short-term gig. He might suggest it’s not life-changing, but…
“I had a dream when I was 17 years old,” Spann says. “It was around the time when that Bowie video came out, with he and Bing Crosby. In the dream, I was riding on a train and I heard Bing singing from the seat in front of me. And then I heard Bowie singing with him. It was them, singing together! And Bowie turned and said, ‘Don’t worry, Jon, you’re going to make it one of these days.’ I could’ve had that dream about REO Speedwagon, but I didn’t. It was Bowie.”
Well, it was the Dream Bowie.
Inspired in a teenager’s mind by the Real Bowie.
The Real Bowie that greeted that same teenager in a New York studio in early 2014, giving the latter a story that’ll remain amazing, confounding, mesmerizing. Forever.
