If you want to understand Jason Lindner fast, just look at the range of people who call him. Jerry Gonzalez brought him into the Fort Apache Band world of Afro-Cuban jazz. Donny McCaslin made him a core part of his electrified quartet. David Bowie wanted him in the room for Blackstar (2016), and that's not a small thing — Bowie was particular about who he let near his final statement. Lindner fit all three contexts without flattening himself to fit any of them.

His piano playing comes out of the post-bop lineage, dense harmony, rhythmic complexity, the kind of touch that comes from years in New York jam sessions and big band rehearsal rooms. But he's just as comfortable behind a wall of analog synthesizers, building pulsing, almost industrial textures that have nothing to do with swing. That's the key thing about Lindner — he treats keyboards and synths as one continuous instrument, not two separate worlds he visits.

His own projects show the split clearly. The Jason Lindner Big Band, which he ran for years out of Brooklyn, was a laboratory for young New York players and dense, modern big band writing — ambitious charts, not nostalgia. Then there's Now vs Now, the trio with Mark Guiliana and Panagiotis Andreou, which sounds almost nothing like a big band — more like a jazz trio that wandered into a drum-and-bass club and decided to stay.

Then came Bowie. Lindner was part of the core band on Blackstar (2016), alongside McCaslin and Guiliana, bringing the jazz quartet's improvisational instinct into a pop record without smoothing it over. It's a strange, dark, brilliant album, and Lindner's fingerprints are all over its textures — those shifting keyboard beds under Bowie's voice.

What you should expect going in: this isn't comfort-food jazz piano. Lindner's music can be dense, electronic, rhythmically tricky, sometimes more interested in texture than melody. But he's not showing off. He's building atmospheres, and he's good enough at it that major artists keep hiring him to build theirs.