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 surfaces at points throughout his catalog — most audibly on "Subterraneans," the elegiac instrumental closer of 1977's Low, which Bowie said was meant to evoke, through its "faint jazz saxophones," the memory of pre-Wall Berlin. Genuine jazz musicians also passed through his sessions as collaborators: saxophonist David Sanborn, a six-time Grammy winner over his career, played the opening solo on the title track of 1975's Young Americans, and trumpeter Lester Bowie — no relation — was a featured soloist on 1993's Black Tie White Noise, prominent enough on the record that its tenth track, "Looking for Lester," was named in his honor. (That album's lead single, "Jump They Say," dates to 1993, not 1983.)

But it was at the very end of his life that Bowie's connection to jazz became direct and sustained, and it traces back to a single night in May 2014, when Bowie and longtime producer Tony Visconti went to see composer and bandleader Maria Schneider's 17-piece orchestra at Birdland in New York. Visconti later said he was "totally floored by the beauty and power of her music"; Bowie decided on the spot that he wanted to write with her. Over a series of workshop sessions that June, Bowie, Schneider, and members of her band worked out an arrangement built around a bassline the band jammed on for hours — Schneider and her musicians didn't even know the song's title, "Sue," until the day of the full session. That session took place July 24, 2014, at Avatar Studios in New York, with Schneider conducting her orchestra — including saxophonist Donny McCaslin, drummer Mark Guiliana, guitarist Ben Monder, bassist Jay Anderson, pianist Frank Kimbrough, and trombonist Ryan Keberle — behind Bowie's vocal. "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" was released that November as the lead single from the compilation Nothing Has Changed, and in February 2016, weeks after Bowie's death, Schneider won the Grammy Award for Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals for it.

Bowie had originally hoped to make his next full album with Schneider's big band. She suggested something smaller instead: go hear Donny McCaslin's working quartet. One Sunday night that same spring, Bowie slipped into the 55 Bar in Greenwich Village, took a table near the stage, watched a set, and left without introducing himself — McCaslin noticed him only out of the corner of his eye. Days later, an email arrived asking McCaslin to join Bowie's new record. McCaslin brought his own band — keyboardist Jason Lindner, electric bassist Tim Lefebvre, and drummer Mark Guiliana, the same drummer from the Schneider sessions — and that quartet, with guitarist Ben Monder added, became the core band on Blackstar, recorded in three weeklong sessions at New York's Magic Shop between January and May 2015. The album was released January 8, 2016, Bowie's 69th birthday; he died two days later. McCaslin's own Beyond Now (2016), released later that year, is dedicated to him; McCaslin is profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com.

Bowie's late-career jazz work moves in two related but distinct registers. "Sue" is orchestral and through-composed, built around Maria Schneider's dense, cinematic big-band writing — Bowie the vocalist inside someone else's harmonic world. Blackstar, arriving fourteen months later, inverts that: a compact, genuinely improvising jazz quartet built around McCaslin's saxophone, playing behind Bowie's own compositions, giving the album a harmonic and rhythmic freedom his rock records never had. Both records share a common origin — Schneider herself — and together they represent the most direct, sustained, and reciprocated engagement with jazz musicians of Bowie's career, closing it out rather than merely decorating it.