Nothing Like The Sun: 1987/88

Sting in preview of world tour... 

Sting offered New Yorkers a preview of his world tour on Sunday and Monday at the Ritz, introducing the seven-member backup band that will play at an arena in Rio de Janeiro this weekend.

''We might make some mistakes, we might get it wrong,'' he told the $20-a-ticket audience Sunday, ''but what the hell.''

Like Sting's Ritz concerts before his 1985 tour, Monday's show was spirited and slightly unpolished. Wearing a necktie along with an oversized frock coat, he looked like a harried, overgrown English schoolboy until he started to dance. Yet the concert showed that he has assembled another supercharged, freewheeling band, and it revealed how far Sting's ambitions have led him from ordinary pop.

When he was the lead singer for the Police, Sting wrote terse, catchy three-minute pop songs - at first about romance, and later about political and cosmological notions. After leaving the Police in the early 1980's (the trio reunited for a final single in 1986), he put together a band of young jazz-trained musicians and let his songs expand a bit. And on his new album, 'Nothing Like the Sun', tunes have given way to vamps and chantlike melodies, usually carrying somber lyrics.

At Monday's concert, even his choices of older material leaned toward vamps rather than pop tunes; instead of Police hits, he chose such songs as 'When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around' and the tamped-down, 1986 rewrite of 'Don't Stand so Close to Me'.

It's not standard arena fare.

While such songs as 'They Dance Alone', about protest in Chile, can certainly move an audience, in other material Sting seems to be counting on the band's interplay to make up for the lack of melody.

On the album, Sting's arrangements feature abundant inner voices and interlocking riffs, and on stage the songs offered plenty of room for instrumental byplay.

Although the band members were still getting the feel of the songs, they were already starting to take liberties - Kenny Kirkland adding Bach-style keyboard figuration to 'Englishman in New York', Mino Cinelu using bells and cymbals for surprise percussion accents in 'History Will Teach Us Nothing'.

A cameo appearance by Branford Marsalis on saxophone, who engaged the band's touring saxophonist, Steve Coleman, in a harmonically convoluted dialogue during 'Sister Moon', brought a full-fledged ovation.

Not all of the music was live; the group used canned synthesizer patterns and digitally sampled vocals for a few songs. Still, the band, which also includes Tracy Wormworth on bass, Delmar Brown on keyboards, Jeff Campbell on guitar and Marvin (Smitty) Smith on drums, managed to bring some spontaneity even to those.

While the band sizzled, the extended vamps began to wear thin; so did Sting's penchant for quoting lyrics (from Willie Dixon, the Wailers and the Beatles) as codas to his own songs.

What was missing became clear when, near the end of the set, the band played Jimi Hendrix's 'Little Wing' and Sting's own 'Fortress Around Your Heart'; finally there were two songs that had memorable melodies.

Even with a superb band, the contrasts built into pop tunes - bridges, key changes, contrasting sections - can make a difference. But Sting has ample material and worthy musicians; he may simply need to reshuffle the set list.

(c) The New York Times by Jon Pareles

Sting challenges self, audience...

"We might make some mistakes, we might get some things wrong, but what the hell?" Sting said at one point in the second of two recent shows at New York City's Ritz. The remark captured the evening's pleasant atmosphere of an open dress rehearsal. In preparation for his world tour, Sting led his seven-piece band through a vigorous two-hour set that, despite occasional flaws, reached soaring high points and struck an impressive balance between muscle and finesse.

The band keyboardists Kenny Kirkland and Delmer Brown, saxophonist Steve Coleman, guitarist Jeff Campbell, bassist Tracy Wormworth, percussionist Mino Cinelu and drummer Marvin Smith - began the show by locking into the percolating groove of 'The Lazarus Heart', the opening track of Sting's recent album '...Nothing like the Sun'. 'Too Much Information', 'We'll Be Together' and 'Be Still My Beating Heart' followed, but the band didn't really begin to swing until the sprightly 'Englishman in New York'.

Clearly enjoying himself, Sting toyed with the song's lyrics ("I'm an English dude in New York") and took a seat near the drum riser as the band jammed with increasing assurance. Special guest Branford Marsalis joined in on soprano sax near the end of the song, then traded licks with Coleman, who played alto, in a spirited exchange on 'Sister Moon'.

The band's spark ignited 'Bring on the Night' and 'When the World is Running Down You Make the Best of What's Still Around'. Kirkland led the attack on piano, Sting rocked on guitar while maniacally leaping about, and Smith, Cinelu and Coleman worked up a rhythmic frenzy.

The set proper ended on a quieter note.

Sting offered a sensitive version of 'Fragile', which he sang in Portuguese as a warm-up for his riff to Jimi Hendrix's 'Voodoo Chile', an apt lead-in to an elegant reading of Jimi's 'Little Wing', Sting's most gripping vocal performance of the set and a showcase for the blazing guitar work of Jeff Campbell.

If there is a shortcoming to Sting's current fascination with jazz, it may be that in seeking more sophisticated musicianship and trying to avoid pop banalities, he has undersold the virtues of melody and concision that characterized his best writing with the Police.
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For a three-song encore, 'Fortress Around Your Heart' - with its urging chorus provided a welcome reminder of Sting's infallible instinct for hooks; the moody 'Consider Me Gone' worked well, but 'Don't Stand So Close to Me', performed in the overly elaborate style of its 1986 rerecording, was in every way inferior to the catchy original version.

Still, if the pop-jazz ratio in Sting's work needs to be adjusted somewhat, that's not to say he isn't challenging himself and his audience. Few shows offer the richness of Sting's set at the Ritz,

(c) Rolling Stone by Anthony DeCurtis