Bill Murray was intrigued. A few years ago, he was boarding a flight from Berlin to New York when he saw a man carrying a cello case onto the airplane. Murray—who is part comedy icon, part Internet urban legend—leaned in to make a little joke. “Are you gonna be able to fit that in the overhead [bin]?” he asked. The comedian didn’t realize the man was world-famous German cellist Jan Vogler, who did not, at first, remark upon the fact that Bill Murray, of all people, had popped up out of nowhere to ask him about his world-famous cello. Vogler, who is quite pragmatic, just answered the stranger’s question: “It has its own seat.” Later, while the cello enjoyed its first-class window seat, Murray and Vogler sat down and chatted across the aisle, quickly hitting it off. Murray, at the time, was flying back and forth to Germany for a movie, so Vogler invited him to a show he was doing in Dresden, about three hours away from the film’s location. Once he was back on set, the actor convinced his driver to make the trip. “The nice thing about Germany is people drive 100 miles an hour,” he says with a smile in an interview with Vanity Fair.
The two have since formed a musical bond, performing a couple of shows together titled New Worlds, where Vogler plays the cello and Murray reads works by writers like Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway. He also occasionally sings. Now the two are expanding their collaboration, recording an album, and preparing for the Festival Napa Valley on July 20, which will also include performances from artists like Gloria Estefan and violinist Joshua Bell. The performances will pick up again in October, with scheduled tour stops throughout California, as well as in Toronto and Chicago, Murray’s hometown.
Murray and Vogler inspire one another, bringing new musical discoveries to the proverbial table. Murray, who has long comfortably moonlit as a musician, compares performing with Vogler to hanging out with one of his friends who occasionally takes him surfing. When he gets up on the surfboard, he feels like he’s catching the wave himself, without realizing that it’s actually his friend propping him up. Vogler compares Murray to the wave itself, pushing him to “re-evaluate” his style and escape his comfort zone. The musician was a prodigious cellist and grew up in a musical household where detail orientation was next to godliness. “Jazz musicians, in a way, are nerds,” he says. “We are so in our world.”
Murray has neatly managed to “sneak into” Vogler’s jazz world, and it helps that he has a background in live performance, happily singing anywhere, from the stages of Saturday Night Live, to random karaoke bars, to Wrigley Field during a World Series game. However, when asked to recall some of the pinch-me stages he’s graced over the years, he turns to his old theater days, remembering the time he and some Second City friends performed a Hamlet-themed sketch at the Kilkenny Comedy Festival in Ireland. The sketch takes place in purgatory, focusing on all the characters who get killed off in the Shakespearean play. “One at a time, they keep rolling in, you know, so the story tells itself as they die off . . . it’s this beautiful, powerful thing,” he says, noting that it ends with a musical number. Without pausing, he breaks into song, singing it from memory: “‘When you were alive, you used to fight about your death . . .”—he goes for a full minute, singing the lilting, reflective number as Vogler watches—“Why didn’t someone cry no more/No more?/This might have been the final score/No more might have been the final score/To be/To be/Sure beats the shit out of not to be!’”
“When the Irish saw the song, they wept,” he says matter-of-factly. “Didn’t see that one coming.”
Vogler’s favorite pinch-me story also has an emotional edge. He once performed at the Dresden Frauenkirche, an 18th-century cathedral that was destroyed in World War II and later rebuilt with donations from all over the world. After it was rebuilt, a concert was staged featuring Vogler, the New York Philharmonic, the famed Jewish-American composer Lorin Maazel, and more, a confluence of countries impacted by the war, which left a deep impact on the cellist. “There was still a man in the orchestra, in the New York Philharmonic, whose family was killed in the Holocaust,” he recalls.
Murray nods contemplatively, going on a quick mini-lecture of the importance of Dresden in the war, adding how stunning the Frauenkirche is to behold now, with its original, blackened pieces mingling with the new, white pieces. “It’s this crazy crossword puzzle of a cathedral.”
That performance was also vital, Vogler adds, because it was one that required the utmost perfection. “If you screw this up, you’re finished,” he remembers thinking. Of course, he didn’t screw up that night. The renowned artist rarely does, but if mistakes happen, he is quick to turn them into learning experiences.
As for Murray? “I’ve never bombed,” he jokes.
Well, except there was this one time, back in his S.N.L. days, where he was mortified to be onstage. It’s not because he was bad, however. It was because that week’s host, Ray Charles, was just too good. “I didn’t wish to be seen,” Murray recalls.
“Ray Charles’s talent was so towering that I just thought, ‘I don’t even deserve to be on the same stage with this guy.’ He was that big, what he could do . . . he knew all his lines cold and he was blind. He didn’t miss a single line the entire show. This guy’s just cold, stone cold,” he says. “He worked with his quartet, he worked with his quintet, he worked solo, he had a whole orchestra. He did all these things and he walked off the stage like, ‘What’s next?’ And I just thought, ‘Please don’t let the camera show me on the stage with this guy. I don’t wanna be seen with him.’ He was good as hell.”
During the tour, Vogler and Murray don’t anticipate bringing any special guests onstage in the various stops, though Vogler is open to it. Murray might be inclined to sing with someone special on the Chicago stop. Vogler turns to him. “Chicago Cubs?” he jokes, noting Murray’s lifelong obsession with the baseball team. But the comedian quickly one-ups him: “I’ve sung with the Chicago Cubs already.”
