Watch Sting Honor David Bowie With Epic, Reverent ‘Blackstar’ Cover

January has been filled with David Bowie tributes to mark what would have been the legend’s 70th birthday, as well as the first anniversary of his death and Blackstar release. But perhaps no homage has been as stunning as Tuesday’s performance at Los Angeles’s Wiltern by Sting, who held the audience in thrall with “Lazarus” and an epic, nearly nine-minute cover of Blackstar’s sprawling title track.

Sting’s appearance was part of “Celebrating Bowie,” a short tribute tour by a core band featuring the largest assemblage of Bowie musicians ever gathered on one stage (including Mike Garson, Gail Ann Dorsey, Earl Slick, Zack Alford, Mark Plati, Sterling Campbell, and Adrian Belew), with special guest vocalists in each city. While the singers’ covers at the L.A. tour top ran the gamut of the Bowie discography, it made perfect sense that Sting — an elder-statesman peer of Bowie’s, at 65, and a fellow jazz aficionado — would favor Bowie’s later-period jazz-rock material.

The stately singer took the stage percussively strumming an acoustic, as he somberly crooned “Blackstar’s” hypnotic, incantation-like opening verse, before setting aside the guitar to truly dig into the song’s gut-punch lyrics. When Sting sang, “Something happened on the day he died,” the venue fell completely silent. Band leader Garson later told the audience, “[Bowie is] with us, I feel. … He’s watching over us.”

This wasn’t the first time Sting has honored Bowie in song. “50,000” a track off his new album 57th & 9th, was written in the week of Prince’s passing, and was inspired by Prince and Bowie as well as Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, Eagles’ Glenn Frey, and other recent rock-star deaths; Sting also dedicated his own “Fragile” to Bowie and other late contemporaries when he reopened Paris’s Bataclan venue last November. This also wasn’t the first Bowie tribute to take place at the L.A.’s Wiltern: Last April, Bowie cohort Tony Visconti’s “Holy Holy” tribute with Spiders From Mars drummer Woody Woodmansey performed there.

Overall, the show’s decade-hopping set list and wide-ranging all-star cast proved that all musical roads lead back to Bowie, and that almost every artist on the planet has been influenced by the Thin White Duke. While Slipknot/Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor seemed woefully out of place following Sting with an earnest but pedestrian “China Girl,” and Perry Farrell’s tepid “Golden Years” fell unexpectedly flat, other singers did Bowie proud. Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott, a diehard glam-rock fan, delivered an exuberant “Suffragette City” (the first song Def Leppard ever performed together, in 1977) and led an audience sing-along of “All the Young Dudes”; Rolling Stones backing vocalist Bernard Fowler brought immense soul power to several classic songs, including “The Jean Genie” and “Heroes”; Kanye West/Duran Duran collaborator Mr. Hudson injected “Changes” and “Starman” with indie-pop cool; and Adrian Belew got wonderfully skronky on “Fame.”

Even Bush’s Gavin Rossdale, who’d seemed like a puzzling addition to the bill, chose his song wisely: “I’m Afraid of Americans,” originally a Bowie duet with Trent Reznor and probably the most ‘90s thing Bowie ever did, which effectively tapped into Rossdale’s aggressive grunge-rock vibe.

But perhaps Bowie himself would have most appreciated Fishbone’s Angelo Moore, who embodied a true a-lad-insane freewheeling spirit as he pranced and vamped onstage in a long black Elvira gown, harlequin clown makeup, and top hat; introduced himself as “N***a Stardust”; and played a wild and wiggly Theremin solo during “Ashes to Ashes.” Funk to funky, indeed.

Night two of “Celebrating David Bowie” in L.A. takes place at the Wiltern on Wednesday. Tuesday’s full setlist was as follows:

Piano medley — Mike Garson
“Rebel Rebel” — Bernard Fowler
“Lady Grinning Soul” — Holly Palmer
“Sorrow” — Joe Sumner (Sting’s son) and Donovan Leitch
“Five Years” — Gaby Moreno
“The Man Who Sold the World” — Jeremy Little
“Changes” — Mr. Hudson
“Life on Mars?” — Joe Sumner
“Sound and Vision” — Adrian Belew
“Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” — Gaby Moreno
“Where Are We Now?” — Holly Palmer
“Starman” — Mr. Hudson
“Space Oddity” — Gail Ann Dorsey
“DJ”/”Boys Keep Swinging” — Adrian Belew
“The Jean Genie —Bernard Fowler
“Suffragette City” — Joe Elliott
“I’m Afraid of Americans” — Gavin Rossdale
“Wild Is the Wind” — Gaby Moreno
“Ashes to Ashes” — Angelo Moore
“Young Americans” — Gail Ann Dorsey
“Win” —Bernard Fowler
“Diamond Dogs” — Bernard Fowler
“Fame” — Adrian Belew
“Fashion” — Alex Painter
“Golden Years” — Perry Farrell
“Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)” — Gail Ann Dorsey
“Stay” —Bernard Fowler
“Moonage Daydream” — Angelo Moore
“Blackstar” — Sting
“China Girl” — Corey Taylor
“Ziggy Stardust” — Brett Hool
“Heroes” — Bernard Fowler
“Dead Man Walking” — Gail Ann Dorsey
“Lazarus” — Sting
“All the Young Dudes” — Joe Elliott
“Under Pressure” — Holly Palmer and Joe Sumner

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