Mercury Falling: 1996/97

Sting stirs the crowd...

Sting turned Starwood into something of a study ground last night, bringing one of the headiest shows the amphitheater has seen.

Some 13,000 people turned out for a 20-song, 100-minute effort that ranged in influences from reggae to jazz to Celtic. It was never quite pure rock'n'roll, part of what made it such an intellectual exercise.

To be sure, Sting injected passion into the concert, his patented quasi-wail topping a mix of his own songs and material from his years with The Police. But the passion was often distilled with pursuits of new arrangements - for example, a slightly slower version of 'Roxanne' that included a trombone solo that led with snippets from The Sound Of Music standard 'My Favorite' Things.

The show reached its climax with the 'Zenyatta Mondatta' nugget 'When The World Is Running Down, You Make The Best Of What's Still Around', with pianist Kenny Kirkland wandering off on a lengthy, adventurous jazz piano solo that stretched key signatures and the imagination. In the background, the two-piece horn section played fierce figures in an oddly successful package of The Police meet Earth, Wind & Fire.

It's not every pop concert that features songs in 7/8 or 5/4 time sig- natures, lyrics with the word "complacency" or phrases such as "the universe and how it's all connected." But Sting is not every pop musician. He's obviously working to balance the mind, body and spirit, a goal that's difficult to attain and even more difficult to maintain.

In that sense, the concert mirrored Sting himself. The musical level was top-notch, though sometimes the pieces were so heady that the listener became more occupied with understanding them than feeling them.

Natalie Merchant provided a complementary co-headliner, as her 10-song, 60-minute performance battled with a balance of head and heart. Merchant's quivering vocal texture and ultra-cool phrasing distance her somewhat from her music, almost as if she's experiencing it as a third party. And yet she danced almost constantly, with slinky hip movements or - at one moment - Carmen Miranda sidesteps. Backed by a seven-piece band, many of Merchant's songs started in a restrained mode, slowly ebbed toward a more emotional point, then abruptly dropped back.

In a larger sense, the show worked similarly. Merchant pulled you in rather slowly, got you tugging against the pieces' restraint, then dropped the energy back.

Sting and Merchant weren't quite something to experience, as much as something to think about.

(c) The Tennessean by Tom Roland