Broken Music: 2005/06

Set to music strength training with a stiff and forced Sting...

Sting is one of the big draws at this year's jazz festival. A really broad audience magnet that, according to the festival management, is needed for the festival to be able to take place at all.

The idea is not entirely wrong, Sting kicked off his solo career with the help of renowned jazz musicians such as Kenny Kirkland, Branford Marsalis and Omar Hakim and has occasionally flirted with the jazz musical idiom.

But that was a long time ago, like 20 years. When Gordon Sumner, as it says in his passport, comes to the main stage at Skeppsholmen, he will have long since entered a phase that has as little to do with jazz as Petter and Eva Dahlgren.

Despite the criticism against him, Sting has made a lot of excellent music, both with the Police and under his own name. Nor do I agree with the mockery of his involvement with rainforests, yoga and tantric sex. Would it be better to be interested in football, wine and limited edition sneakers?

Unfortunately, it is impossible to hold back the whining as both his concerts and albums have followed a downward curve in terms of quality. At Skeppsholmen we are spared the terrible keyboard player Mr Kipper, for which we are grateful. However, the suffering is not reduced when Sting has supplemented guitarist Dominic Miller, who looks like a young Bob Geldof, with the equally boring guitarist Lyle Workman.

Together they are the best in the world at not playing too much or too little, too fast or too slow, too loud or too quiet. The only thing they cannot do is get the music they are working on to lift, take hold and start swinging on its own. With the mighty Abe Laboriel Jr. on drums and Sting's bass obscenely high up in the sound mix, the quartet gets a rather strange sound.

Strangely enough, it sounds better from the right side of the stage than the left. Starting with 'Message In A Bottle', you rush through a track list that forms a representative sample map of his career, both with the Police and on his own. Sometimes it's a little catchy, sometimes it sounds like a set weight training, most of the time it's routine, stiff and forced.

The absolute bottom is a horribly bad version of 'A Day In The Life', which incidentally has just been voted the best Beatles song by both the website beatlessweden.com and the British music magazine Mojo.

Stripped of all charge and dynamics, the fine pop classic is dragged through the mud and makes a militant Beatles Taliban, like the undersigned, evilly fantasize about how a falling light rig could put an end to the misery.

The large audience, who are there to save the jazz festival's strained finances, swallow everything, even though it is the parade numbers like 'Every Breath You Take' and 'Roxanne' that cause the most excitement and make the concert resemble a combination of Allsång på Skansen and a moderately hard Friskis & Svettis session.

You can stand that, but towards the end Sting's annoying jungle roar, which he stole from Harry Belafonte, becomes unusually unbearable. And the jazz, were there any traces of it?

Well, during a prolonged jamming part in 'Roxanne', Sting came into George Gershwin's 'It Ain't Necessarily So', it was as close to a jazz musical expression as he got that evening. And then it sounded extra bad.

(c) Svenska Dagbladet by Dan Backman

Sting makes a shock entrance: but then we are lulled into 80s perfection pop...

List some world artists who take the stage ten minutes before the scheduled time.

So. That was it. And that's where Sting's whims end for the evening.

You can't accuse him of having any star-studded divalatures. Undramatic, unpretentious and completely surprising, Sting takes to the stage. So spontaneous that the audience puts the black gold from the coffee cows down their throats. He manages to spit out the entire raw 'Message In A Bottle' before we get up.

But when the shock of Sting's attack entrance has subsided, one fact is quickly established.

It's not the evening of surprises.

Instead, all you have to do is warmly welcome yourself to the 80s. Here, time has stood still and crispy drums are squeezed among magnificent guitar riffs.

It's musical perfection at its most perfect. Popular music that's polished so smooth that it can caress a baby to sleep despite being over 100 decibels.

Gordon Sumners has put together a collection sorbet where Police gems replace the most popular hits of his solo career. A steady flow of Sting, no more, no less. So arranged that the motley Beatles cover 'A Day In The Life' and the fusion-funk delight 'Driven To Tears' irritate as much as 'Every Breath You Take' sounds flat and stressed.

It's small grains of gravel that are noticeable. In the wrong way.

But the mature crowd thrives in the time machine. Here you get to sit on each other's shoulders without being shot down by the stage guards' monster lamps. Even reaching for the lighter in soft moments like 'Shape Of My Heart' and 'Fields Of Gold'.

Right then and right there it's quite beautiful.

(c) Aftonbladet by Joacim Persson

Ironic Sting in a good mood...

''I'm almost starting to cry. He only plays the songs you recognize'' the girl next to me happily exclaims after Sting swaps the electric bass for a guitar and the fragile 'Fragile' rings out as the last encore in Skeppsholmsmörkret.

And so it is. In just the first twenty minutes or so, Sting and his three-man backup have time to burn through 'Message in a Bottle', 'If I Ever Lose My Faith In You' and 'Englishman in New York', among others. Or ''Englishmaaan'' as it sounds from an almost ironic Sting who seems to be in an unusually good and outgoing mood. There is a lot of singing back and forth with the audience and many yeah, yeah-ah-oh, Roxann-oh and Roxann-ah and a howling long ahooo from Sting himself as the introduction to 'Fields of Gold'.

For the more die-hard Sting fans, the set-up of the current ''Broken Music'' tour is perhaps too light-hearted. For an outdoor concert with a folk festival feel, it's all the better suited: even those who don't know Sting or the Police at all are probably familiar with most of the songs.

At times, the usual Sting objections creep in here too. When Dominic Miller changes guitar for the umpteenth time or when the time signature changes never seem to end in a 'Roxanne' that flows into an interlude where Sting finds himself singing nonsense about Jonah in the belly of a whale, the stamp of competence is not far off. But the arrangement with just two guitars, bass and drums gives the songs a beneficially dirty basic drive. In other words, not a single soprano saxophone - the scourge of many Sting songs - within earshot. It feels good that way.

(c) Dagens Nyheter by Sara Norling

Sting - Stockholm Jazz Festival...

Sting is so energetic tonight that he's leaving 10 minutes before the scheduled time. The guy's pants are definitely on fire.

Sting is rested, looks like he's drunk a lot of water, slept with an expensive Cinderella mask on and his khaki-vibe Tisha fits like a glove.

He really moans with excitement when he counts down to classics like 'Message In A Bottle' and 'An Englishman in New York'.

It's audience-pleasing and at the beginning: uplifting.

The overly long jazz funk solos are skipped in favour of old Police songs.

It feels like Sting and I might have a cosy time tonight. How wrong I was.

Suddenly he's transformed. Full-blown, empty echoing and cold instrument loops that have spent too much time in a reed boat on Lake Titicaca sail out onto Skeppsholmen, straight into the arms of all the cultural workers and the Science Teacher men who dance their hearts out to Sting's tantric fusion.

I realize that the audience is swinging more than Sting will ever do.

Especially when he realizes that he is the right person to interpret the Beatles' A Day In The Life with an exaggerated white-man's-soul feel.

It mostly just becomes a fifteen-minute long drawn-out practical joke.

When the last music teacher funk of the night with a lot of bass and military green basically dies out, it feels a little sad but extremely necessary to wave goodbye to Sting.

(c) Expressen