Adam Lambert, Trent Reznor and Andra Day Shine in ‘A Bowie Celebration’

While no tribute can be considered what David Bowie really deserves, the three-hour live broadcast of “A Bowie Celebration” on Saturday came close to giving the duke his due, with a cast worthy of dozens including Duran Duran , Trent Reznor, Andra Day, Yungblud, Adam Lambert, Ian Hunter and Gary Oldman leading superb arrangements made by presenter Mike Garson, Bowie’s longtime pianist.

The $ 25 webcast will continue to be available until 6 pm PT / 9 ET on Sunday through the HYFI platform (click here) or the Rolling Live Studios production platform (here), at which point it will be taken down – much to the dismay of fans who used the live chat function of the last site to say that they were watching in a continuous loop and waiting for a permanent record of the program. The broadcast was originally scheduled to premiere on Friday night, at Bowie’s 74th birthday, but was postponed one day at the last minute – shadows from Justin Bieber’s delayed New Year’s Eve live broadcast, but attributed in this case to “technical problems and COVID-19 restrictions. ”(His final exhibition hours now coincide with the fifth anniversary of Bowie’s death on January 10, 2016.)

The three-hour highlights included big names and singers selected from the ranks of supporting singers or other lesser-known figures. Two female duets that came close to the beginning and end of the webcast easily counted as highlights, although they represented completely different genres, as Bowie’s catalog did. The second song of “A Bowie Celebration” had hard rock queen Lzzy Hale joining actor / singer Lena Hall (Tony winner for “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”) to belt, together filmed separately, the classic “Ziggy Stardust ”“ Moonage Daydream. ”(Hale and Hall recently met for the first time on live agent RWQuarantunes from agent Richard Weitz and came together on their mutual love for Bowie there.)

The penultimate number, however, had Andra Day joining Judith Hill on the same stage for a song that was originally conceived as a duet, “Under Pressure”, starting on the stools as a smoothly nuanced R&B duet supported by Garson before the appearance of a full virtual band kicked the brown Bowie / Queen into a taller and more familiar outfit.

The final series of stars on the 30-song set also included Adam Lambert lending his not-so-direct sense of theatricality to a musically direct reading of “Starman”; Ian Hunter revived Mott the Hoople’s cover of Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes”, as well as sang “Dandy”, his own 2016 tribute to Mott’s former producer; and, to close the show, Rolling Stones support singer Bernard Fowler, giving an emotional touch to what has finally become Bowie’s most highly regarded song, “Heroes”.

The Bowie catalog award for any talented singer remains “Life on Mars?”, Which features one of the most majestic melodies in all of rock; the honor of claiming it here fell to one of the youngest members of the cast, Yungblud. “The best moment of my life,” tweeted the singer, who changed his name on Twitter on Saturday to “Yungblud’s on Mars”, posting a photo of his performance on his laptop.

best time of my whole life. ⚡️ pic.twitter.com/VMb60U8jbL

– YUNGBLUD’s on Mars (@yungblud) January 10, 2021

Although “Life on Mars?” was Garson’s favorite when someone asked him to play even a piece of a Bowie song, he wisely passed that song on to the man who played the piano on the original track, Rick Wakeman of Yes, who didn’t miss a step in his ability to bring splendor to that role, even though he played at least hundreds or thousands of times in the middle half century than Garson.

Probably no performance was more expected than that of Trent Reznor and his score / Nine Inch Nails contributor Atticus Ross. Reznor impressed Bowie enough to be invited to tour and record with him in the mid-90s. Instead of reviving his recorded collaboration, Reznor chose two other songs from the Bowie catalog – the avant-garde “Fashion”, which featured a band treatment complete and the inclusion of Reznor’s wife, Mariqueen Maandig Reznor as a support vocalist and, more stripped down, the less well-known “Lodger” track, “Fantastic Voyage”, which considered the coils deadly in the shadow of nuclear proliferation at the time.

While most of the webcast had artists singing in front of groups led by Garson made up mostly of Bowie’s studio alumni and tour bands, Duran Duran opened the show without any outside help, with “Five Years”, the song most obviously befitting the scenario birthday, even though the sci-fi theme of the number “Ziggy” seemed ominously five years ahead of impending disaster, instead of five years tragically back with a devastating loss.

Also presenting their contribution separately, without the help of any of the bands in the house, was a supergroup formed by Corey Taylor, Taylor Hawkins, Dave Navarro and Chris Chaney, who sent high energy performances of “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” and ” Hold on “.

Actor Taylor Momsen won Garson’s approval, he said in an introduction, saying she became a Bowie fan at age 2. One of the few performers to shoot in close-up in a home studio, the “Gossip Girl” star chose the rarely revived “Quicksand,” from “Hunky Dory,” an album released more than 20 years before she was born. Although Garson made only moderate comments on the 30 songs performed, he called “Quicksand” “one of the most profound songs David has ever written”.

Garson had been Bowie’s compatriot from the moment he was hired to tour in 1972, becoming famous for being featured on the albums “Aladdin Sane” and “Young Americans” and intermittently returning for tours until Bowie’s last before he did. he retired from live performances in 2006. His extensive piano solo on the title track of “Aladdin Sane” remains one of the most celebrated strictly instrumental parts of the Bowie catalog, and his revival has been a part of all tribute tours. that he led since Bowie’s death five years ago, as it was here, when Boy George did a music medley with “Lady Grinning Soul” and “Time”. But Garson – who was always more of a jazz musician who happened to find his fame as a rock accompanist – lent the same jazz feel to passages in other numbers in this three-hour tribute, leading mutual fans of Bowie and jazz to wish that perhaps a day he led a strictly jazz greeting to Bowie’s infinitely rich ouevre.

From decades of support for Bowie, Garson is well aware that different ensembles are well suited for Bowie’s career times, and therefore, as he did when he led tribute tours on the road, he brought together different configurations of musicians. What he played live with him on stage on several songs included Charlie Sexton (who also sang “Let’s Dance” and a “DJ” / “Blue Jean” medley) on guitar, Carmine Rojas on bass and Alan Childs on drums. But he also enlisted different settings to play most of the selections remotely, sometimes with up to 13 musicians visible on the screen in completely separate video bubbles. The most viewed remote players include Gerry Leonard on guitar, Mark Plati on guitar and bass and Sterling Campbell on drums, with frequent appearances by guitarists who count as superstars in the world of Bowie lovers, Earl Slick and Carlos Alomar, among other alumni . (Among the valuable musicians who were not part of Bowie’s legacy on stage, but played an important and recurring role in this show: LA string players, Section Quartet.)

For “Young Americans”, sung by Corey Glover of Living Color, Garson managed to bring together virtually six impressive people who appeared on the original 1974 single: himself, Alomar, drummer Andy Newmark, saxophonist David Sanborn and alternative singers Ava Cherry and Robin Clark.

In the only blatantly apparent audio glitch at three o’clock, viewers in the chat room wondered why the sax solo in “Young Americans” was not playing. It was, at least in theory – attentive viewers could see Sanborn crying in his Hollywood plaza in one corner of the screen – but he was not to be heard. Fortunately, that was not the case with the two other songs on which Sanborn appeared: “Can You Hear Me”, sung by the late Bowie collaborator Gail Ann Dorsey, and a medley of “Sweet Thing” and “Candidate” that allowed Sanborn, Garson and Slick successive, extended soils.

The nine-minute epic medley “Sweet Thing” / ”Candidate” – undoubtedly a highlight, if not The highlight, from the webcast – was sung by Fowler, who certainly counted as an MVP, between that and his end of the show “Heroes”. It was enough to make a Stones fan want Mick Jagger to call saying he was sick at some point so that we could hear what it would be like if Fowler took control of an entire set of Stones as a replacement, if only for a day.

But “A Bowie Celebration” was also notable for letting the spotlight shine on a succession of smiling souls. Prior to his later duet with Day, Judith Hill was a solo standout with “Lady Stardust”, accompanied only by Garson, who was not ashamed to use the “voice of a century” terminology for the Prince protected from a tie. Dorsey also led the show with “Strangers When We Meet,” from the “Outside” album, as well as “Young Americans’” “Can You Hear Me”.

Other noteworthy contributions included Billy Corgan doing a low-key “Space Oddity”; Perry Ferrell and his wife Etty Lau Farrell going dramatically to the top with “The Man Who Vend the World”; Joe Elllott of Def Leppard facing the underrated “Win” as well as the perfectly rated “Ziggy Stardust”; Jesse Malin taking to the streets of New York for a while, on a rare trip outside the studio walls, to dub his own “The Jean Genie”; former sideman Peter Frampton finally getting his own version of “Suffragette City”; Ian Astbury making the only nod to Bowie’s career at “Blackstar” with the sinister “Lazarus”; and Gary Oldman doing an equally unique dive into the Tin Machine catalog with a portentous “I Can’t Read”. Hunter’s “Dandy” was not the only song not composed by Bowie on the show, Garson also paid tribute to Mick Ronson by covering guitarist Bowie’s cover of Richard Rodgers’ instrumental “Slaughter on 10th Avenue”, which he played in 1974.

A complete setlist can be found here.