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Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime): Behind David Bowie’s Killer Jazz Assault
JIMMY KING
In Depth

Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime): Behind David Bowie’s Killer Jazz Assault

Pushing David Bowie’s love of jazz music to the fore, Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) was an uncompromising artistic statement.

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Nothing Has Changed was the name of David Bowie’s career-spanning 2014 compilation. It was also, on the face of it, a misnomer of a title for something which covered, in reverse chronological order, five decades of music across three CDs, and which, however it was sequenced, made clear that there had been plenty of changes for the man who’d so urgently sung of them on his 1971 album, Hunky Dory. Then again, perhaps it was right: restless creativity is the thread that unifies all of Bowie’s work. And, as the collection’s opening song, Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime), made clear, that wasn’t about to change at all.

Resurrecting the murder ballad, reigniting his love of jazz and reinventing himself yet again, with Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime), Bowie delivered a killer statement of intent…

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The backstory: “We got together and fooled around with ideas”

A mere six months before the release of Nothing Has Changed, Bowie and his long-term producer, Tony Visconti, settled into Birdland, the legendary jazz hangout in New York City, to watch a performance by the Maria Schneider Orchestra. Unbeknown to the Minnesota-born bandleader and composer, Bowie had long wanted to work with her, and, after being “totally floored by the beauty and power” of her band’s performance that night in May, he and Visconti sought to make that happen.

Busy with her own projects, Schneider initially wasn’t sure she had the time to commit to helping Bowie with his work, but after listening to an untitled demo for what would become Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) she imagined herself “doing something” with the piece. Subsequent meetings would reveal just what that something could be.

“We got together several times and fooled around with ideas,” Schneider told the MinnPost. “I would work on some things, and he would, and then we’d share them, and he would say ‘I love that’ or ‘No, I don’t like that.’” While the pair found their way towards an arrangement for the song, Bowie kept his ideas for lyrics close to his chest. He wanted it to be “dark”, he told Schneider. But when pressed on what the song was about, he laughed the question off: “I don’t know. Maybe vampires?”

The original version: “As much a statement as a song”

By the time Schneider’s orchestra assembled at Avatar Studios, on 24 July, to record the song, the bandleader had invited guitarist Ben Monder, one of her regular collaborators, into the fold, while Bowie had pulled in saxophonist Donny McCaslin and drummer Mark Guiliana. Schneider had tipped Bowie off about McCaslin’s small combo a month earlier, and, after ducking into the intimate 55 Bar to catch the group in action, he’d become, Visconti later recalled, “totally convinced that he wanted to work with them”.

Receiving lyric sheets for the first time since rehearsals began, the group finally learned the title of Bowie’s new song: Sue. And there was plenty more to discover during the recording session, at the start of which the musicians were also handed what Guiliana described as “quite minimal” charts that provided “more of a guide, rather than a specific notation” for their performances. With Bowie and Schneider directing the session, the ensemble was encouraged to improvise around Bowie’s vocals, channelling the mindset of a narrator who spirals from elation (“Sue, I got the job/We’ll buy the house/… Sue, the clinic called/The x-ray’s fine”) to blind rage, pushing his lover “down beneath the weeds” after discovering that she was pregnant with the child of a rival – “that clown”.

As the session progressed and the cacophony swirled, the group edged towards their own brink. “There’s the free section with the drums going,” Schneider told Uncut magazine. “I’m conducting out of time, then all of a sudden it had to get in time – in with the drums. It was scary for me but we got it done.” Snatches of this high-wire act were filmed for use in the song’s promo video; also incorporating moody black-and-white footage shot on a dank London set, the clip brought a film-noir aesthetic to Bowie’s tale of cold-blooded murder.

Released as a 10” single on 17 November 2014, backed with another new song, ’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore, Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) was, to The Guardian’s ears, “as much a statement as a song”, its avant-jazz blow-out rushing from the speakers “at a speed that could make listeners recall [Bowie’s] experiments with drum’n’bass on 1997’s Earthling”. With some fans noting in its narrative a similarity to that of the 17th-century John Ford play that lent its title to ’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore, and others picking up on subject matter addressed in the Robert Browning poems Porphyria’s Lover and My Last Duchess, Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) marked a bold new step for Bowie, who would take the spirit of its recording session into those he would soon undertake for his final album, 2016’s ★ (aka Blackstar).

The ‘Blackstar’ version: “They allowed us to do what we do”

“It wasn’t spoken out loud,” Tony Visconti told NPR, “but we were going to make a David Bowie album with jazz musicians, but they weren’t necessarily going to play jazz.” Retaining McCaslin, Monder, Guiliana and bassist Tim Lefebvre from the original Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) ensemble, Bowie also added keyboardist and McCaslin collaborator Jason Lindner to the call sheet when he had the group convene at the now-defunct Magic Shop studios, in New York, in early 2015, to begin work on Blackstar.

Speaking to Uncut, McCaslin revealed that the Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) re-recording “took the longest” of all the album’s songs to complete, thanks to the difficulties they had in finding a new arrangement that would suit the smaller group. In a handwritten note for the track, Bowie had indicated that it should be reworked “with strong bass”, but after a few “really wild” jams failed to gel, McCaslin made a crucial alteration to the instrumentation.

“I went back to Maria’s score and reduced it to clarinet, alto flute, tenor,” the saxophonist explained. “Then I put those parts on and everybody felt it was feeling complete. I was trying to have those guys play more open and to get it edgier and loose.”

Bringing LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy in on percussion, Bowie and Visconti encouraged the group to go as far out as they could. “They gave us eight bars to just rage,” Lefebvre, whose bass work tipped a hat to Plastic Soul’s 1997 song Brand New Heavy, later recalled. “It’s amazing how open-minded they were as a team.” Trimming a little under three minutes from the original version’s running time, the new Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) burst forth with an urgency that took The Guardian’s Earthling comparison and ran with it while losing none of the dramatic depth of the earlier cut. “Mark and I had played a lot of live drum’n’bass together, and it’s shocking and amazing to hear that on a David Bowie record,” Lefebvre added. “They allowed us to do what we do on this album!”

When it came to recording his vocals, however, Bowie pulled in the opposite direction, delivering something restrained and haunted, firmly holding his ground amid the churning tempest that gathered before swallowing him up. The results were, NME noted, something that took the “big band melodrama” of the original Sue and welded it “to a frantic, drum’n’bassy rhythm, its cacophonous climax reflecting the lyric’s murderous intent”.

The legacy: “He’s so brilliant it’s scary”

Placed as the fourth track on Blackstar, where it also shared space with a re-recorded version of its original B-side, ’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore, Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) proved that Bowie had lost none of his questing spirit when it came to creating what would become his final album.

“He’s so brilliant it’s scary,” Maria Schneider said of working with Bowie during this period. “He knows so much music and so many things.” Having briefly worried that she would receive criticism for working on a song in which a man murdered a woman, she came to two conclusions: “I didn’t write the lyrics. And it does sound rather good.”

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