"Exhilarating art rock..." - NPR
“Juxtaposes grungy art-rock with punk-jazz, electronica and hip-hop... [his] most radical offering yet." - mojo
BIO.
“It’s a fresh wind that blows against the empire.”
In many ways, these nine words encapsulate the ethos of Donny McCaslin, whose escapades on the tenor saxophone have both embraced and sometimes repudiated contemporary notions of jazz—often simultaneously and with a deep understanding of what has come before and what lies ahead. Although he garnered widespread acclaim for his stint as bandleader for David Bowie’s swansong LP Blackstar, McCaslin’s journey to that point encompassed numerous yard markers of the up-and-coming jazzer with boundary-busting on his mind.
McCaslin began playing the sax at 12 in Santa Cruz, CA and during his teenage years he performed in his vibraphonist father’s band. His background and acumen inevitably led to a full scholarship at the Berklee College of Music, a four-year stint with Gary Burton’s quintet, and a subsequent three-year stretch with Steps Ahead, Additional shift work with Maria Schneider, Danilo Pérez, The Gil Evans Orchestra, and Elvis Costello also dot his resumé.
The Bowie gig, obtained through the recommendation of Schneider, ultimately lit the fuse and super-charged McCaslin’s aspirations to take his music in exhilarating new directions and carve new pathways in what used to be called jazz fusion. For McCaslin, this meant leaning into a hybrid of jazz and art rock, which is clearly evident in his two most recent albums.
First came Blow (2018), which introduced searing electric guitars, programming of all sorts, studio effects galore, and provocative lyrics sung over the top, followed by I Want More, a return to instrumental music but produced and mixed by Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, MGMT, Tame Impala, Mercury Rev, Sleater-Kinney) to bring a distinctly non-jazz consciousness to the act of creation. The striking result prompted the jazz journal Jazzwise to declare the album “…a uniquely hard-hitting, direct, studio-driven recording that organically joins together elements from electronica, post-rock, jazz and improve more persuasively than perhaps anything before it. Strike another blow for the revolution in McCaslin’s head. New music is always right around the corner that underscores the insurgency in the music to come.
TOURING CONFIGURATIONS
Quartet
TOUR DATES.
JAZZ & ROOTS DIVISION AGENTS: