Mike Garson’s ‘A Bowie Celebration’ Features Rock Legends And Emerging Talent Performing A Mix Of Authentic Covers And Ingenious Re-Imaginations

David Bowie starred as Jareth, the Goblin King in Jim Henson’s magnificent 1986 musical fantasy film Labyrinth 15 months before Evan Rachel Wood was born. But the actress, model, and musician vividly recalls watching the now-cult classic as a child and cherishes the five original songs Bowie wrote and recorded for the soundtrack. 

For many younger Bowie fans, Labyrinth was their introduction to an unrivaled musical and theatrical oeuvre spanning 54 years. 

“Evan’s singing something from Labyrinth,” Mike Garson, Bowie’s longest standing band member, told me during a phone call yesterday ahead of his second annual A Bowie Celebration. “She grew up with that movie, and it affected and changed her whole direction towards life. There was something about that movie that was so, so powerful, even though she was so young when she saw it.”

Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon and John Taylor, Noel Gallagher, Def Leppard and lead singer Joe Elliott, Living Colour, Rob Thomas, Gary Oldman, Walk the Moon, Bernard Fowler, Judith Hill, Gaby Moreno, Gretchen Parlato, Joe Sumner, and Jake Wesley Rogers, are among the diverse roster of world-leading musicians joining Bowie alumni band members, including Gail Ann Dorsey, Earl Slick, Charlie Sexton, Alan Childs, Steve Elson, Mark Guiliana, Omar Hakim, Stan Harrison, Tim Lefebvre, Gerry Leonard, and Carmine Rojas, for the January 8 global streaming cinematic experience.

Last year, Garson overcame tremendous obstacles to present a Bowie birthday charity concert  to rival Live Aid and Woodstock in a digital age. A year later, as Omicron rages and COVID-19 cases in the United States rocketed to a high, Garson had to cancel a simultaneous live show at The Theater at Ace Hotel in Los Angeles. 

Ticket holders will have streaming access on RollingLiveStudios.com for 24 hours beginning on what would have been Bowie’s 75th birthday. Like last year, $2 from every ticket sale will benefit Save the Children, a charity important to Bowie and the beneficiary of funds raised from his sold-out 50th Birthday Concert in 1997 at Madison Square Garden featuring many of the artists performing both years. 

“I’m trying to have a balance of things that sound like the record and new versions. There are those tracks that are really authentic to the original recording, and then half (for which) I created arrangements that are just totally different, which allows me to further the music and be creative. It makes me happier to find new things. I know I have a responsibility to do both, so I have a balance,” said Garson, who Bowie chose to join Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars on tour, forever transforming both careers. Borrowing from his encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and classical music, Bowie desired the inimitable Garson for his accomplishments in those genres and explicitly because he wasn’t a rock pianist. 

Brooklyn-born Garson was a quiet family man walking on stage and into the studio with Bowie who had formed his own fungible, flamboyant, fantastical universe that forever changed music history and culture. Carrying on the spirit and fervor of Bowie’s revolutionary creative dynamism, Garson’s reimagining Bowie tracks for new performances doubtlessly enchants the Starman across realms. 

Building on last year’s stellar concert, Garson will elegantly weave together at least 26 songs for this extravaganza, playing piano across genres and styles throughout the live stream. Just as Bowie embodied and elevated fluidity of gender and genre, Garson is singular in his improvisational genius.

Enthusiastic and prolific, Garson acknowledges the challenge of keeping secret the setlist and who will perform which songs and which songs will be reinterpreted. As youthfully exuberant as he is wildly accomplished, Garson did let slip that Elliott will share Goodnight Mr. Jones, his unfeigned tribute to Bowie released nearly a year ago.

“My idea is still what it was last year, but it’s a little more codified in that David was a great, great songwriter. And Gershwin was a great songwriter, and Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan all covered Gershwin songs. Why shouldn’t great artists who resonate with David cover his songs? So that’s been my thought process for six years since I’ve been doing this (tribute) and the second year of streaming,” said Garson. “Over 150 singers in the last six years have been doing Bowie songs from Lorde to Trent Reznor to Billy Corgan to all the people this year. About half of the singers are new ones, and half are the same ones from last year. Half the songs are new ones, but half the songs I felt I had to do again, because they’re such great songs.”

The show is sure to be full of thunderbolts and lightning. Bowie’s close friend, Ricky Gervais, will make a special appearance that’s sure to spark joyful tears with remembrances of their conjovial camaraderie since the pair met following the comedian’s breakthrough sitcom debut on BBC’s The Office in 2001.

Collaboration is central to this effort and the intersection of the careers of Bowie, Garson, and all the artists who have participated over the past six years. Garson is featured on Falling, the last track on Duran Duran’s new album, Future Past. Deeply influenced by Bowie, Duran Duran bravely and flawlessly covered Bowie’s Fame on their 1981 self-titled debut studio album, and they performed Five Years at last year’s live stream. I wept at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on April 12, 2016, just three months after Bowie died on Jan. 10, 2016, just two days after his 69th birthday, as Duran Duran seamlessly blended their Planet Earth (1981) with Bowie’s Space Oddity (1969). It’s as if time and space are inconsequential in the continuum of music that surrounds Bowie and Garson. I’ve been fortunate many times, including on August 30, 1987, screaming in delight at Olympic Stadium in Montreal, when Duran Duran on their Strange Behaviour tour opened for Bowie’s Glass Spider tour.

“I don’t know one artist who influenced more other artists than David by a large margin, including in the field of acting, as well as singing and songwriting, and a way of being in fashion,” said Garson. “That is to me why he’ll be known in 5,000 years, as opposed to 500 years or 50 years. He’ll be known like a Michelangelo or a Rembrandt or a da Vinci. …  I think David will have the longest historic memory because we started to really realize his body of work. … Everyone knows Ziggy and that whole period, but what he created in the 90s, when I came back on the body of work, and the quality of the singing and the voice tone and the songs, people are just starting to wake up to. He was absolutely great, but there was more to him.”