David Bowie was born January 8, 1947, in Brixton, London, England, and took up saxophone as a teenager after his half-brother Terry Burns introduced him to the recordings of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. Bowie's own saxophone playing can be heard on tracks including "Subterraneans" (1977) and "Jump They Say" (1983), and jazz musicians appeared as key session collaborators throughout his career, most notably David Sanborn, whose Grammy-winning saxophone playing anchored the solo on 1975's "Young Americans," and Steve Elson, whose baritone sax solo on "Modern Love" came from the Borneo Horns, Bowie's touring horn section.

Bowie's most direct and sustained jazz statement came at the very end of his life: his final album, Blackstar (2016), was recorded with a genuine working jazz quartet, the Donny McCaslin Group, with saxophonist Donny McCaslin serving as the album's core collaborator and bandleader of its backing musicians. McCaslin later released Beyond Now (2016), an album dedicated to Bowie. Trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist Lester Bowie also appeared on half a dozen tracks of Bowie's 1993 album Black Tie White Noise.

Bowie died January 10, 2016, in Manhattan, New York City, of liver cancer, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of Blackstar.

Bowie's decision to record his final album with a full working jazz quartet, rather than his usual rock personnel, gave Blackstar a genuinely jazz-informed harmonic and rhythmic character that stood apart from the rest of his catalog, closing his career with the most direct and sustained jazz collaboration of his life.