Blue Turtles: 1985/86

Sting doesn't always mesh with his new jazz-band companions...

Sting is a Renaissance man for the 1980s. He wants to be recognized as a serious artiste and a major pop star at the same time.

That's why he sings pop smashes with one of rock's biggest bands, the Police; he stars in movies opposite Jennifer ('Flashdance') Beals and Oscar-winning Meryl Streep, and he works with an artful band of hip, young jazz funkateers in his spare time.

Sting's desire to balance art and popularity is why he brought his ensemble to the St. Paul Civic Center Forum Tuesday. The 5,500-seat auditorium can accommodate enough people to satisfy the star's ego.

But the subtleties of the textures of his music were lost in the echoey acoustics of this high-ceilinged, gymnasium-like structure and, in the end, the performance was neither as satisfying as Sting's remarkable record with this band, 'The Dream of the Blue Turtles', nor as good as it should have been.

He is working with a potentially exciting band featuring former sidemen for jazz luminaries Wynton Marsalis, Miles Davis and Weather Report, plus two female singers. 

But sometimes the 34-year-old singing bass player-turned-guitarist seemed out of place with these young black musicians, most of whom are about 10 years younger than he. At times it seemed like watching a basketball game where the star was the only white player on an all-black team and he never passed them the ball.

Although these five players have been working together on and off for eight months, they did not sound like an organic ensemble. The concept was to give them the freedom of jazz players to solo within the narrow structure of a brief pop song. The result was that they simmered but seldom cooked, and the music was rarely as involving as the Police's music, which has been among the most adventurous and jazzy music of any band that plays in hockey arenas.

The best moments in the two-hour concert were when the players communicated like jazz musicians. Branford Marsalis' saxophone echoed the vocal lines as Sting sang 'Moon over Bourbon Street', a torchy song to a vampire. Marsalis, keyboardist Kenny Kirkland and drummer Omar Hakim truly stretched out during the spacy, intense, Weather Report-like 'I Burn for You', a song from the sound track of 'Brimstone and Treacle', one of a series of forgettable Sting movies. Then the band charged through 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free', Sting's current hit with its soft-funk groove and catchy pop chorus.

The group played all but one song from the 'Blue Turtles' record and new arrangements of several obscure Police tunes, three of the band's biggest hits and a couple of blues standards, which showed the limitations of Sting's tenor voice. Sting and friends reworked the Police's 'One World' into a syncopated street-corner tune that blended into a nifty medley with his new band's 'Love Is the Seventh Wave', a pleasing Caribbean workout. A noisy rendition of 'Every Breath You Take' missed the haunting qualities of the original recording, but spare arrangements of 'Roxanne' and 'Message in the Bottle' brought Sting's most inspired vocals and turned into crowd-pleasing sing-alongs.

The former schoolteacher, former jazz bass player and current chief of Police on leave of absence clearly relished being in the spotlight as much as he enjoyed grooving with his hotshot young sidemen. He danced his rubber-legged dance and joked around with his fellow musicians; he encouraged fans to cheer when he gargled between songs and he delighted in the girls who jumped onstage to give him a kiss or tousle his blond locks.

Such is the price for a Briton who one year sings contagious fluff like 'De Do Do, De Da Da Da' with two other bleached-blond pop idols and a few years later sings didactic numbers about nuclear war and the plight of coal miners with black musicians while simultaneously starring in a cinematic remake of 'The Bride of Frankenstein'. Such is the life of a Renaissance man in the '80s.

(c) Minneapolis Star & Tribune by Jon Bream