Various, Party Party (Soundtrack)

Album of the Week, February 15, 2025

Let’s cut to the chase. Why am I writing about an obscure British movie soundtrack in the middle of this series of posts about the Police? I have one good reason: Sting singing “Tutti Frutti.”

Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about movie soundtracks.

Movie soundtracks are profoundly strange, particularly if you never see the movie. There is presumably some underlying narrative or unifying conceit in a reasonably well made movie soundtrack, but rarely does the soundtrack by itself provide a clue as to what happens in that narrative (in this way, at least, Brimstone & Treacle was an exception to the rule). Or the musical selections may provide an idea of the aesthetic of the film; probably the best example of this is the soundtrack to any Wim Wenders movie (Wings of Desire or Until the End of the World).

Then there’s Party Party. A British comedy film in the style of John Hughes, most of the material on the soundtrack is cover songs—many of which are of 1950s rock’n’roll tunes, but some of which are of much later material—by a who’s who of early ’80s British pop artists, including Elvis Costello, Bananarama, Madness, and Sting. I can’t imagine a narrative that would string all these songs together, and my attention span long ago shortened beyond my ability to sit and watch a movie from start to finish. So we’ll have to take the material on the soundtrack solely on its musical merits. Whether this is advantageous to the material remains to be seen.

“Party Party,” by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, appears to have been written specifically for the movie; it doesn’t appear on any of the earlier albums or odds-and-sods collections. This was 1982, the year Elvis released Imperial Bedroom, so the band was at one of its career peaks of musical energy and the lyrics were at his acidic best: “The last thing I remember I was talking to some fellas/Then she said to me she’d have a word with her good-looking mate/And handed me a pint pot filled with Advocaat and Tizer/And I woke up in the flowerbeds of beer and fertilizer.” The sound of the song is baroque in the spirit of Imperial Bedroom but takes its point of departure from Motown rather than the Beatles, with a fantastic horn section over Bruce Thomas’s agile bass line and Steve Nieve’s boogie-woogie piano part. It’s a pretty great opener.

The movie Party Party is apparently set at Christmastime, judging from the next cover: Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run,” here covered by pub rocker and Nick Lowe collaborator Dave Edmunds. Edmunds always had a taste for 1950s rock and roll, and this faithful cover leans into that lane; it’s well made but not especially eye opening. At least the next cover takes some risks. “Little Town Flirt” was a Del Shannon number before Scottish new wave band Altered Images got hold of it, and you can hear the bones of the song but it’s fully transformed by Michael “Tich” Anderson’s Siouxsie and the Banshees inspired drums on the opening and by Clare Grogan’s adenoidal vocal, as well as the constant heartbeat of Johnny McElhone’s bass. The only part of the arrangement that hasn’t aged well is the cheap synthesizer line, but at least that updates the song.

Bad Manners was a “two-tone” and ska band, but you’d never really know it from this cover of the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak,” at least not the very end when the outro is transformed into a ska number. The saxophones do some mildly interesting things at the end of the verse, but otherwise there’s not much to talk about here.

That’s not true about “Tutti Frutti.” 1982 was not a year in which Sting had great fun, between the collapse of his first marriage and the tense partnership with the Police, so hearing him do a howling, hooting Little Richard impression is astonishing. It feels ungenerous to complain about such a performance, but I have to note that his vocals are not completely in the pocket; then again, neither is the pub rock band that backs him up. They’re convincing at the chugging undertone but don’t quite capture the manic energy of the original. Then again, Sting does a good job of making up for it, especially on the wordless third verse.

Bananarama’s version of the Sex Pistols’ “No Feelings” should feel out of place, given the twenty year jump forward from Little Richard, but the band invests it with a driving energy and just enough handclaps to underscore the 1950s flavor lurking beneath the sleazy punk surface of the original. The band’s vocals pull the song forward to the New Wave moment; you can imagine it being played on radio alongside the Go-Gos.

“Driving in My Car” by Madness is one of the other originals on the record, and was a hit for them on the UK Singles chart. Its energy is squarely in line with the New Wave moment, but the arrangement, with car horns and even dog barks, feels more like a novelty record. More successful is Modern Romance’s cover of R&B single “Band of Gold,” given an electro-pop makeover with synthesizers and Chic-esque guitar, along with the quintessential British New Wave vocals that somehow call to mind a little Erasure mixed with a touch of Duran Duran. It’s a lot of fun in a way that feels like a precursor to Wham!

Bad Manners makes up for the disappointment of “Yakety Yak” with “Elizabethan Reggae,” a piece with a complicated history. Beginning life as “Elizabethan Serenade,” a piece of light orchestra music originally performed by the Mantovani Orchestra, the 1968 reggae cover by Boris Gardiner and the Love People became a hit single. Bad Manners plays it as a straight ska number, and it’s a blast. The same, regrettably, cannot be said for Pauline Black’s version of “No Woman, No Cry.” Her vocal is fine, interesting even, but the leaden arrangement, particularly the joyless bass, take all the air out of the performance.

Sting’s “Need Your Love So Bad” is more successful. Here he proves adept at R&B balladry, displaying the wonderful flexibility of his lower range, and is able to overcome the unremarkable guitar (played by Micky Gee, the guitarist in Dave Edmunds’ band) in a convincing version of the bluesy song originally performed by Little Willie John. The backing vocalists (unfortunately uncredited) definitely help, as does the gospel-tinged piano. Sting knew the material well, having sung it in Last Exit, and he inhabits the pleading lovesickness of the narrator.

The big tonal shift on the second side is the Midge Ure cover of “The Man Who Sold the World.” Ure’s voice strongly recalls Bowie’s, and the late post-punk synths make for a good arrangement of the original, but it’s a complete left turn stylistically, presumably coming at the big plot climax of the movie (I love you, my readers, very much, but I’m not going to spend time watching this movie to find out where the song comes in). The arrangement slowly falls away, leaving just the synths to take the song out. It’s a pretty great cover, just a strange choice here. Chas & Dave’s version of “Auld Lang Syne” returns us to the 1950s-esque world of the rest of the soundtrack with a rockney (their word – Cockney rock) cover of the New Years Eve favorite.

There are a lot of inessential soundtracks out there, but sorting through the chaff can occasionally bring some reasonably good wheat to the surface. Sting’s tracks are probably the best reason to check this album out, but the title track is a great find for fans of Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and “Elizabethan Reggae,” “Band of Gold” and “The Man Who Sold the World” are all highly successful covers. Not a bad strike rate, on the whole. Thankfully Sting had bigger horizons that he was working toward, in the form of one more tensely-recorded record with the Police. We’ll hear that next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: I may be too chicken to watch the movie, but it turns out that it’s on YouTube, so you can if you want:

Various, Brimstone & Treacle (Soundtrack)

Album of the Week, February 8, 2025

When you’re the frontman of an increasingly successful band, with multiple Grammy awards to your name,1 and you’re photogenic to boot, the well established career move is to extend your brand to other arts—specifically, film. Sting was not immune to this trend, but, as befits a cerebral songwriter given to quoting philosophers in his writing (and rhyming “shake and cough” with “Nabokov”), his initial movie roles were art-house rather than blockbuster: first appearing as Ace Face in the film version of the Who’s Quadrophenia, then his first starring turn in an art house film.

Brimstone & Treacle started out as a BBC television play by Dennis Potter (who also wrote the television serial Pennies from Heaven, substantially rewritten into a 1981 flop starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters). The play, about a woman who becomes nonverbal and disabled following an automobile accident, and a mysteriously charismatic young man who charms her religious family with his piety, with predictably awful results, was withdrawn before broadcast by the BBC due to the final scene in which the angelic, or devilish, young man attempts to rape the disabled girl, who is subsequently returned to consciousness and regains full control of her body. —I watched this movie as a Blockbuster rental in 1989, having no idea what I was getting myself into, and was sorry.

The soundtrack, on the other hand, has some redeeming virtues, though tonal consistency is not one of them. The opening begins with a fairly ominous chord in the synths with a rolling slightly squelchy sound atop it, but fades out after about eight measures to the sound of a small brass band and the Finchley Children’s Music Chorus singing “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder” (a recording that does not appear to be on YouTube), a Christian hymn written in 1893. In the film this accompanies a scene of happy choristers leaving a church, at which point the camera cuts to a brooding Sting in a raincoat, watching them. (Sting broods a lot in this film). The music too changes, returning to that squelchy synthesizer over the sound of the wind, for the title piece. “Brimstone & Treacle” is mostly dark atmosphere, but it introduces a catchy theme (V – XIII – V – VII – V – V – IVx3 – VII – V), here played in a high register on a keyboard, that repeats over and over. If you feel like we’ll be hearing that theme again, you’re right.

But first: a saxophone and some echoing marimba introduces “Narration,” wherein Sting reads somewhat ominously from the script of the television play, introducing the choirboy scene we’ve just heard and the sudden appearance of Sting’s character, Martin; the introduction of Mr. Bates (the father of the disabled girl), who’s shown writing treacly verses to his wife with a “face heavy with contempt”; and a series of images of the end of day commute home, bookended with the ominous whisper “Which one? Which one will it be?” As a teenager hearing this track, I was impressed with the use of music and spoken word; it is still musically interesting and appropriately moody, but the narrative seems less ominous and slightly forced now.

This bit of writing leads into the first of three tracks by the Police on the soundtrack. “How Stupid Mr. Bates” features some of the same squelchy synth in the introduction, but this is quickly overcome by Andy Summers’ guitar synth and the throbbing bass line, which stays constant on the tonic throughout the song. Stewart Copeland lays down a consistent backbeat with slight flourishes of irrepressible high hat magic around the edges, and the guitar and synth duet on the theme, a rare major key punctuated by intervals of modal suspension. As Police instrumentals go, it’s no “Shambelle” (the brilliant Andy Summers-penned B side to “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” which might be their best non-album track), but it’s no “Behind My Camel” either.

We stay in a pop vein with “Only You,” a Sting solo number that feels as though it was written with disco in mind—just listen to the play of that funky bass line against the saxophone and that four-on-the-floor drumming (here performed by Jeff Seitz, Stewart’s drum technician!). But the instrumental and the chorus are a jam—at least, until we hear Sting start to shout Martin’s prayer that he offers up for the healing of the disabled Pattie for the benefit of her gullible mother. (He has by now insinuated himself into the family, presenting himself as an upright, devout young man who wants to help them and their daughter.) The combination of the disco and the prayer are, to quote a line from “Narration,” “ridiculous… incongruous… disturbing.” Someday I’d like to hear “Only You” without the prayer atop it; I think it’d take its place alongside some of the other great early 1980s funk classics.

This leads us to “I Burn for You,” a song that Sting had carried around since the days of Last Exit, and which he had offered to the Police during “Zenyatta Mondatta.” The band rejected it as “too sentimental,” so Sting gave it to the dance troupe Hot Gossip, who released it as a single. Perhaps as result of hearing their performance, the Police finally agreed to record it (see: “Demolition Man” and Grace Jones), and it showed up here. Where the Hot Gossip version was pretty faithful to the Last Exit original, the Police did much the same as what Miles Davis did to Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints”: played it a little faster, a lot more ominously, and with an absolutely incredible drum part. The ominousness is largely courtesy of the washes of guitar under the verse that rise like a tide under Sting’s lyrics; the drums mostly lift themselves out of the mix in the chorus and in the extended outro, where the “Brimstone” theme, played in the bass, merges into the song and the band members wordlessly sing and shout with the rising energy of the thing like a ritual. Stewart’s drums sound like Can’s Tago Mago collided with Tony Williams and Fela Kuti, and then it all rises to a crescendo and a sudden end. “I Burn for You” bookends a tight, spellbinding first half of the album which is musically and thematically consistent throughout. If the second half of the album continued this way, it might have been numbered among Sting and the Police’s best.

Instead, we open with an incongruity: Sting’s solo cover of 1929 musical comedy song “Spread a Little Happiness.” Released as a single, the first by Sting as a solo artist, it hit #16 in the UK charts, and is meant to underscore the insincere optimism of the slippery Martin. It is deliciously ironic and fun to sing along with, but definitely a break from the mood set by the first half.

As is “We Got the Beat.” Yes, the Go-Gos single from their first album. Aside from their position as the Police’s labelmates on A&M/IRS Records, it’s not entirely clear what the song is doing on the soundtrack. It does appear in the movie, in a disturbing scene where Martin puts on Mrs. Bates’ necklaces and and lace glove, gazing at himself in a trifold mirror, but it’s an interruption of the steadily bleaker mood.

That mood returns with “You Know I Had the Strangest Dream.” Functionally “I Burn for You, Pt. 2”, the soundscape expands the quiet two bar intro of the earlier song in a quiet meditation until the “Brimstone” theme loudly returns once more.

If “We Got the Beat” is incongruous, “Up the Junction” is a complete non sequitur. While it too technically appears in the movie (ten points to the first person who can tell me where), the only reason for its appearance here seems to be Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford’s mention of the devil in the penultimate verse, as we start to get an idea of the monster that lies beneath Martin’s pious surface.

“Bless This House” is the ultimate moment of disconnection on the album, an impromptu choir singing the hymn as the bourgeois Mrs. Bates enjoys a moment of domestic bliss, all while Martin rapes her daughter in the next room. This bridges crashingly into “A Kind of Loving,” featuring a full-out trio jam by the Police with the screams of actress Suzanna Hamilton (Pattie) and Martin’s vicious command to “shut up!” over the top. While the jam is top notch, high form Police, I literally cannot bring myself to listen to the track because of the screaming as Pattie awakens from her nonverbal prison. After Martin makes a hasty exit, she is shown to be fully restored in body and mind, leaving the question: was the devilish young man the agent of her restoration after all?

We’re left to ponder this question as “Brimstone 2” plays us out. An extension of the theme with an interpolation of the “I Burn for You” tune, it attempts to wrap the album up with a bow. It does a better musical job of this than the film does in bringing closure; we are left with a foul taste in our mouths from the thoroughly malicious Martin, magnetically watchable though he might be thanks to Sting’s movie-star cheekbones.

Sting was to take other movie roles, most notoriously playing the young Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in David Lynch’s Dune alongside Kyle McLachlan and Patrick Stewart, but also appearing opposite Meryl Streep in Plenty and playing Baron Frankenstein in The Bride with Jennifer Beals. His movie career took a back seat to his music over the years, with a memorable turn as JD the bar owner in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels as his last major role. There would, of course, be plenty more music from Sting, including another life for “I Burn for You,” which we’ll explore in a while. But first in 1982 he made one more soundtrack appearance, and it’s one of the odder moments in his catalog. We’ll hear it next time.

You can listen to most of this week’s album (minus “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder” and “Bless This House,” neither of which are on YouTube) here.

BONUS: The whole movie is on YouTube. Don’t watch it with your family.

BONUS BONUS: Here’s the Last Exit version of “I Burn for You,” with a video taken from Brimstone and Treacle.

BONUS BONUS BONUS! The Hot Gossip version of “I Burn for You” is … something else.

  1. (The Police had won their first Grammy, for best rock instrumental performance, for “Regatta de Blanc” in 1981 (yes, two years after its release. What can I do? It’s the Grammys), and their second for “Behind My Camel” in 1982. Also in 1982 they won a Best Rock Performance Grammy for “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” meaning that for the first time one of the band’s singles featuring Sting’s singing received the award. One imagines that was a validating moment.) ↩︎

Various, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball

Album of the Week, February 1, 2025

A benefit show that was initially held only every two to three years, hosted by British comedians whose television heyday was a decade earlier and featuring a clutch of rock musicians playing in acoustic settings, would seem to be an odd source for transformative insight on anything. But when the benefit show is for Amnesty International, the comedians were Monty Python, and the musicians included the likes of Pete Townsend, Eric Clapton, Bob Geldof, Phil Collins, and Sting, literally anything could happen.

Amnesty International loomed large in my 1980s teenagerdom, thanks to their work to bring attention to abuses of human rights such as torture, miscarriages of justice and prisoners of conscience. The way they chose to bring attention was to involve musicians and other celebrities to perform at events designed to raise awareness of the international problem. The Secret Policeman’s Balls were the first of these benefit events, coming 18 years after Amnesty’s founding and two years after the group won the Nobel Peace Prize.

We’ve talked about how the Police’s touring in 1979 and 1980 began to open Sting’s eyes to poverty and injustice on a global scale. When comedian Martin Lewis, who had partnered with Python alum John Cleese to create and produce the Amnesty International benefit shows, invited Sting to participate in a four-night benefit concert series at the Drury Lane theatre in London in September 1981, Sting wasn’t a hard sell. Never mind that he had never performed solo before, ever; he was game not only to play some Police songs live, but also to lead the assembled musicians in the theme song.

These initial performances, later released under the title of The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball (a sequel to the original The Secret Policeman’s Ball from 1979), offer a unique view of Sting as he takes the first steps away from the Police and into solo performing. And he wasn’t alone; both this record and its predecessor are full of unexpected performances and pairings.

The Drury Lane concerts happened just a month after the final recording sessions for Ghost in the Machine, which as we discussed last week were full of challenges and confrontations among the members of the Police. It may very well have been a relief for Sting to perform on his own these nights, even they were his first-ever solo performances. What we know is that he went back to his two oldest, biggest hits with the Police and remade them as solo arrangements that allowed him to take total control.

The record opens with “Roxanne,” here re-imagined as a gentle ballad. Sting accompanies himself on guitar, outlining the chords of the song but otherwise leaving the focus directly on his voice. This performance, coming a few year’s after the song’s 1978 debut, showcases the evolution of his voice. In the original performance it’s an uncannily high tenor, but much of the color is provided by his diction. In this performance the first verse feels a good deal like the performance with the Police, but in the chorus he lengthens syllables for emphasis, and going into the bridge he lowers his volume considerably, pulling the listener in closer. In the final chorus he replaces the fade-out of the record with a descending chord, adding a syllable and singing to “Roxanna.” It’s an effective performance and presages the way he would treat the song for years to come.

“Message in a Bottle” gets a similar treatment, but with Sting playing the arpeggiated riff throughout the verse, turning to chords on the chorus beneath an intimate rendering of the chorus that outlines the musical pivot and pulls the listener in even closer. On subsequent choruses he improvises on the melody, moving around the chords and bringing the vocal line higher to emphasize the alienation of the narrator.

Confession time: I have never been a Jeff Beck fan, and my respect for Eric Clapton has gone dramatically downhill in the last ten years. The performances here don’t really shift my opinions that much. “‘Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” is a meh ballad, and “Farther Up the Road” an OK blues number. When “Crossroads” arrives it’s a relief; Clapton’s retelling of Robert Johnson’s pivotal Delta blues song is iconic enough to survive any number of re-arrangements and retellings, let alone the blues-rock guitar flourishes both men bring to the performance.

Bob Geldof was, at the time of the recording, probably best known as the frontman of the Boomtown Rats, whose 1979 hit “I Don’t Like Mondays” is an unlikely single about a school shooting (specifically, the Cleveland Elementary shooting in San Diego). Here the song is given a vocal and piano performance by Geldof and Johnnie Fingers, the Rats’ keyboard player and co-author of the song. After the blues rock of Clapton and Beck, it’s a bracing performance, especially the final verse and chorus as Geldof embraces the madness of shooter Brenda Ann Spencer. (Geldof was among the musicians whose career was radically changed by his work with Amnesty International; in 1984 he responded to television coverage of famine in Ethiopia by writing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” with Ultravox frontman Midge Ure, collaborating with a who’s who of rock and pop musicians to record it under the name of Band Aid, and then organizing the massive sixteen-hour cross-Atlantic all-star benefit concert Live Aid. That “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” also spawned the maudlin charity single “We Are the World” cannot be entirely laid at Geldof’s feet.)

The second side opens with another musician in the process of going solo for the first time. Phil Collins had released his first solo album, Face Value, earlier in 1981, and the lead single “In the Air Tonight” had been a huge hit, reaching #2 on both the UK and US charts and Number One in several European countries, largely on its use of gated reverb on the massive drum solo that arrives at the climax of the song. But this performance is more restrained, with Collins on piano and longtime guitarist Daryl Stuermer playing acoustic. While the performance loses something in drama, it does underscore Collins’ songwriting and vocal abilities on the cusp of what would turn out to be international superstardom in the 1980s. (Famously, Collins played in both the London and New York Live Aid concerts, taking the Concorde across the Atlantic so that he could both perform his own solo material and take the drums with an attempted Led Zeppelin reunion.) Collins’ first album was all over the place musically, and the folk-inspired “The Roof is Leaking” is a less iconic performance, though Collins’ vocal performance tells the story effectively and Stuermer’s banjo adds some welcome texture.

There were two types of artists involved in the concert series; the up-and-comers like Sting and Collins, and the established draws like Clapton and Beck. Folk singer Donovan clearly fell more into the latter category than the former, perhaps even inhabiting his own category: the legacy artist. He had gone to a good deal of effort in the 1960s and 1970s to shed comparisons to Bob Dylan, but here he was in 1981 performing “The Universal Soldier” and “Catch the Wind,” two of his most Dylan-like songs from the earliest days of his career. Perhaps the overall atmosphere of protest and social justice inspired him to return to these tunes; “Catch the Wind” in particular is effective here, with a gentle but steely vocal and understated harmonica.

The concert and the album close with an all-star performance of Dylan’s own “I Shall Be Released,” acting as an informal sort of theme song for the night and resonating with Amnesty’s core mission. The band plays what is credited as Sting’s arrangement of the song, and Sting performs admirably on lead vocals, backed by every performer on the rest of the album and then some (Midge Ure and a large group of singers that includes Sheena Easton join on vocals, Python-adjacent musician Neil Innes on guitar, and a full horn section including Mark Isham). The performance devolves into a full on jam session, particularly in the reprise that follows the applause break at around seven minutes. Oddly, it would not be Sting’s only collaboration with Eric Clapton; we’ll hear more from that odd pairing later.

The Secret Policeman’s Ball concerts were the start of a number of influential threads in 1980s pop music, notably star-studded charity singles and concerts and political activism by artists. As we’ve noted above, this performance led directly to “Band Aid”, Live Aid, and “We Are the World”; it also was Sting’s introduction to both solo performance and activism, both of which would be threads of his career for years to come. Next week we’ll look at another (mostly) solo excursion that he undertook following Ghost in the Machine that picks up another thread of his career.

You can watch the whole program, including both the comedy and the music bits, on YouTube (the video is age-restricted thanks to the comedy so can’t be embedded on my page).

BONUS: The video that was released of the event included a few songs from the 1979 Secret Policeman’s Ball, including what I believe are definitive versions of the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Drowned” (from Quadrophenia), performed solo by Pete Townshend. You can watch that bit here:

The Police, Ghost in the Machine

Album of the Week, January 25, 2025

He had been writing the song for five years; it predated the Police. “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” had been written while Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland were all members of Strontium 90 with Mike Howlett from the psychedelic rock band Gong. Sting recorded it as a four track demo in a loft in Howlett’s home, playing acoustic guitar and bass. He took it to the band early in their career, who objected that the song was “soft”; he said, “no, look, this is a hit.” He was right, of course.

Sting’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” became the second of the “strong three” opening songs on their 1981 album Ghost in the Machine, following the same programmatic approach as they had previously employed on Zenyatta Mondatta. (Tip, kids: starting an album with three strong songs is the way.) The lead-off, “Spirits in the Material World,” sets up the album and “Every Little Thing” is followed by lead single “Invisible Sun.” Both the other two songs continue the theme of dissatisfaction with the realities of the world, this time writing about dictatorial leaders and continual war.

For such strong lyrical content, the album was recorded in an idyllic place. AIR Studios was in Montserrat in the British Caribbean, a residential studio where the band could live as well as record. They were joined by producer Hugh Padgham instead of their prior producer Nigel Gray; Padgham was notable for helping to invent the “gated reverb” drum sound that became a staple of 1980s rock while recording Peter Gabriel’s third solo album with Phil Collins (later perfected on Collins’ first solo album); he had been producing albums for Collins and Genesis (Abacab), helping them get more of a “pop” sound. As the Police began shifting away from their raw trio sound of the earlier records, Padgham’s experience was helpful, even if not completely welcomed by Copeland and Summers. Copeland recalls, “I was getting disappointed in the musical direction… With the horns and synths coming in, the fantastic raw-trio feel—all the really creative and dynamic stuff—was being lost. We were ending up backing a singer doing his pop songs.”

Picture sleeve for Ghost in the Machine, slightly more literal than the album cover.

The first sound you hear on the album (after a brisk drum hit from Copeland), in the opening to “Spirits in the Material World,” underscores Stewart’s point. The Police had kept to guitar, bass and drums during their first three albums, but here the hook is played prominently on a Casio keyboard. Sting claims to have accidentally written the hook while messing about with a Casiotone “while I was riding around in the back of a truck somewhere.” Sting liked the synthesizer sound so much that he wanted to record the song without guitar; after much arguing with Summers, they compromised and the lead is played by both guitar and synthesizer, albeit with the guitar buried in the mix. Copeland’s drumming is jaw-dropping here, especially considering the tricky rhythm, shifting from a syncopated four in the verse with no clear downbeat to a clearer backbeat in the chorus.

I should also say a word here about the lyrics. I neglected last week to note the most remarkable thing about “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” the offhand reference to Vladimir Nabokov in the last verse. If the slant rhyme of “shake and cough” with “Nabokov” and the casual introduction of a parallel to Lolita stands as the principal reminder in Sting’s songwriting that he was an English teacher,1 the reference in this song to the philosophy of Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine must stand as a close second.

“Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” also has non-traditional instrumentation. While the other keyboard parts on the album are played by the Police (according to various sources, even Stewart Copeland was programming and playing synth parts), the piano on this track was played by session musician Jean Roussel. Originally recruited by Sting to play on the second demo for the song, recorded in Le Studio in Morin Heights, Quebec, Roussel’s piano part from the demo survives on the final track; the band was unable to better his part in AIR Studios, and they simply played over the demo. To be clear: it’s a great song, singable but musically deep, featuring a tension between D minor and D major and a memorable lydian scale in the bass line. It also features one of Sting’s great lyrics: “Do I have to tell the story / of a thousand rainy days since we first met? / It’s a big enough umbrella / But it’s always me that ends up getting wet.” (It should be noted that Ghost was recorded while Sting was separating from his first wife, Frances Tomelty, following the birth of their second child.)

If “Every Little Thing” is poppy and personal, “Invisible Sun” returns to the world of Zenyatta Mondatta for its inspiration. Sting had become a tax exile living in Galway in 1982, and strongly felt the psychological impact of the ongoing troubles in Belfast. He wrote the song about the persistence of the everyday people who lived through the hunger strikes and bombings, feeling that there had to be a light at the end of the tunnel to give them hope. For Stewart Copeland, the “invisible sun” also shone on Beirut, where he had grown up thanks to his father’s travels in the CIA; he accordingly also felt the song in a deeply personal way. Sting refers in the opening lines to “looking down the barrel of an ArmaLite,” the rifle used by paramilitary organizations including the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The song’s subject matter, reinforced by its video showing clips from the Irish conflict, led to its being banned by the BBC, a first for the Police. It would not be the last time Sting wrote about war and its horrors, but it was the first time such a song took the Police to almost the top of the UK charts (it stalled at Number Two the week of September 27, behind “Prince Charming” by Adam and the Ants. Welcome to 1981).

After the powerful one-two-three punch of the opening comes a different kind of run, unusual for a Police album. Where previously there would have been a left turn into something goofy, maybe with a Stewart Copeland song, on Ghost there’s another three-song run by Sting that takes us through the end of the A side and into the B, and introduces another new instrument. I don’t know at what point Sting picked up the tenor saxophone and decided that he needed to play it on Police records, but here he was on “Hungry for You (J’aurais toujours faim de toi),” playing a persistent (and slightly flat) hook — and singing in French. Almost the entire song is in French, except for the final chorus. And it’s horny. Apparently Tomelty’s best friend, Trudie Styler, helped with the translation into French as well as the circumstances of the composition; it was during this time that Sting started a torrid affair with her (spoiler: they got married in 1992 and are still married today). The song itself is slightly overwhelming in its instrumentation; the band appears to have thrown everything at the composition.

“Demolition Man” is similarly rich, but it started life during the Zenyatta Mondatta sessions. Written in the summer of 1980 while Sting was living at Peter O’Toole’s house in Connemara, Ireland, the song wasn’t used for Zenyatta, and Sting ended up offering it to Grace Jones, who recorded it for her 1981 album Nightclubbing. When the Police heard their version, they were inspired to re-record it, or as Andy Summers puts it, “Sh*t, we can do it much better than that.” Summers, indeed, is the hero of the song. If he spent most of his time playing in a relatively restrained way on Ghost, here he is unleashed, and the guitar solo he performs is absolutely magnificent. In fact, it’s better than the lyrics, though there’s a fair amount of obscure Britishisms buried in the song (a “three line whip” refers to British parliamentary politics).

“Too Much Information,” the third horn-driven workout in a row, is a groove, and with the shouted “Oh!”s I wonder if the band had been listening to Fela Kuti—or at least the Talking Heads. The lyric, meanwhile, is one that deeply resonated with me in high school: “Too much information/runnin’ through my brain/Too much information/drivin’ me insane.” Stewart’s drums are tight, with only the occasional splash on the high hat or fill at the corners hinting at his prowess. Summers gets to unleash his guitar in the last 30 seconds and it brings the song alive just as it fades out.

“Rehumanize Yourself” continues the horn-driven instrumentation but moves away from funk grooves and back to something closer to New Wave (of course, it’s a Stewart Copeland co-write). The lyrics continue the theme of humanistic opposition to industrialization and racism, and include the only moment in the Police’s work that has made me turn down the volume to avoid playing a four-letter word in front of my kids (“Billy’s joined the National Front / He always was a little runt / He’s got his hand in the air with the other c***s / You got to humanize yourself”). Sting comments on and condemns the undercurrent of violence that causes the police to embrace firearms and leads street gangs to kick immigrants to death and join far right fascist movements. Need I mention the song’s continued relevance?

The follow-up, the reggae-inflected “One World (Not Three),” attempts to offer a recommendation for how, exactly, one is supposed to re-humanize one’s self. Sting takes the perspective that borders are arbitrary human constructs (“lines are drawn upon the world / before we get our flags unfurled”) that distract us from the truth that “we can all sink or we all float / Cause we’re all in the same big boat.” Were it not for the overdubbed saxophone chorus, this song could have fit comfortably on Reggatta de Blanc, as Stewart is let loose to provide any and all drum wizardry that he can.

The mood shifts on “Omegaman,” the sole Andy Summers track. Unlike “Behind My Camel,” all three Police participate on this track, but the expertly layered guitar is the main attraction behind the dystopian lyrics, as we follow a narrator contemplating suicide through deserted streets beneath “skies alive (like) turned-on television sets” (William Gibson, call your office). Apparently this high-energy track was originally supposed to be the lead single from the album, at least in the mind of A&M Records executives, before Sting put his foot down and insisted that it not be issued. (Small wonder that stories continue to be told of the bad blood between Sting and Summers.)

“Secret Journey” opens with the last new instrumental sound the band pioneered on the album, the Roland GR-300 guitar synthesizer. The story, about a man seeking joy in sadness and the “love you miss” from a blind holy man, revisits the plight of lost love that appeared in their earliest songs. But where the narrator of “Does Everyone Stare” or “Can’t Stand Losing You” wallowed in self-pity, this narrator’s fate is ambiguous. Did he find the love he missed, or did he make his secret journey, become a holy man, and ultimately abandon his original goal? Sting’s purported inspiration for the song, Meetings with Remarkable Men by the mystic George Gurdijieff, would suggest the latter. But this path to re-humanization feels quantifiably different from that suggested in the earlier songs, seeming to lean toward a path of abstinence and avoidance of other people. We’re in a darker place as the song draws to an end.

Literally so, as the portamento bass note leads us into “Darkness,” Stewart Copeland’s brilliant drum work our guide as synthesizers and guitar accompany us ever deeper on our journey. Copeland wrote the song, and in it we begin to hear articulated some of the threats that would ultimately tear the band apart: “I could make a mark if it weren’t so dark / I could be replaced by any bright spark… Instead of worrying about my clothes / I could be someone that nobody knows.” But if the lyrics explore the temporary prison of fame, the song is a perfect blend of high hat, saxophone and guitar, and the crackling thunder of the snare.

Sometimes your vinyl collection is beautiful pristine original pressings, and sometimes it’s a BMG Record Club (aka RCA Music Service) pressing. C’est la vie.

Ghost in the Machine was a big step forward for the Police, in terms of popular recognition and sales, as well as in songwriting and the making of a coherent concept album. But the forces that pulled them along the path to greater market success were also pulling at the carefully knotted strings that held the trio together. Soon after the recording of Ghost, one of the members was getting his first taste of life as a solo performer. We’ll check that out next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Some of the b-sides for Ghost in the Machine were fantastic. We’ll get to my favorite one soon, but “Shambelle,” which appeared as the b-side for “Invisible Sun” (and “Every Little Thing” in the US), is a great instrumental—much better than “Behind My Camel,” which actually won a Grammy for best instrumental rock performance.

  1. Thanks to the reference in “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” I searched my local public library shelves (shout out to Grissom Library) for Nabokov’s works and was reading his collections of short stories and translations of his early works in my senior year of high school. I ended up taking a course on Nabokov’s novels during my third year at the University of Virginia, studying with the great Julian Connolly, during which I read just about everything Nabokov had published, including the astonishing late novels Ada, or Ardor and Pale Fire. I highly recommend taking the opportunity to go down a rabbit hold of this kind if you ever get it. Hey, who said rock isn’t educational? (And what would have happened if I went down an Arthur Koestler rabbit hole instead?) ↩︎

The Police, Zenyatta Mondatta

Album of the Week, January 18, 2025

It had to be recorded quickly, and it couldn’t be recorded in England. Both essential points of how the Police’s third album came to be were symptoms of their burgeoning success, which had exploded ever since Reggatta de Blanc and “Message in a Bottle.” They were now touring constantly, reaching out to and building up the fan base, not just in the US and the UK but worldwide, so the recording for this album was recorded in four weeks while they were on their second ever big tour. Stewart Copeland specifically recalls finishing the album at 4a.m. the day they were to head out on the road for their next tour.

And the recording location? It couldn’t be recorded in England for tax reasons, because the Police were now making serious money. So they brought producer Nigel Gray, who had also done their first two albums, to Wisseloord Studio in Hilversum, Netherlands to do the sessions.

There was another key difference with these sessions too. Where Reggatta de Blanc included songs composed by the band and some credited solely to Stewart Copeland, here there are only two from Copeland and one (his first) by Andy Summers. Sting’s songwriting had strengthened and sharpened and he was writing more and more material—a trend that would continue through the rest of the band’s recordings. And he was writing material that was informed by what the band saw on tour—especially the extremes of wealth and poverty in the countries they toured.

That sharp writing begins with “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” Opening with an unfamiliar sound on Police albums, a bass synth, followed by a skeletal guitar hook, the song proper begins with a stark vamp between two notes in the bass with an ominous dub reggae rhythm in the guitar and drums above. Sting’s melody, deliberately simple, tells one of his most controversial lyrics, the story of a schoolteacher who has an affair with one of his young students. Sting has always described this as pure fiction, an exercise in imagination; one imagines that such stories were unfortunately commonplace in the school where he taught before beginning his life with the Police. There’s so much that changes in this song from the first two Police albums. Gone is the unfocused punk feel, all but the barest hint of the reggae influence, the group improvisation. In their place is impressively minimalist songwriting that gets into your memory circuits and a sense of true menace. There’s more power in the first 30 seconds of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” than in an entire side of Outlandos D’Amour.

“Driven to Tears” is the track where you most directly hear the impact of the Police, and Sting’s, new broader worldview. Opening with a driving beat in the bass and drums, he addresses the listener directly: “How can you say that you’re not responsible? What does it have to do with me? What is my reaction; what should it be/confronted by this latest atrocity?” The chorus is punctuated with open, ringing chords from Andy Summers and a relentless bass line that arpeggiates down a diminished minor chord. The impact of all the touring the Police had done is apparent in the performance; this is a tight ensemble, but when they let loose, as Andy Summers does on the bridge with a searing eight-bar solo, they really rip. The tune closes without bringing hope; the circling bass line remains grim throughout.

The hope, such as it is, arrives in the next track. “When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” shows that the Police were paying attention to the rules of good album construction, loading the first side of Zenyatta Mondatta with their three strongest songs of the album. It’s arguably the strongest start to an album they had done yet. And “When the World…” is a killer. Built on a simple ascending modal scale that Sting makes funky through the use of leading tones, Copeland’s relentless drumming and Summers’ textural guitar underpin Sting’s cheery song of post-apocalyptic survival, where he has an endless supply of canned food and only one VHS tape to keep him company. The break keeps the same funky beat and but adds double tapping on the bass and a slowly simmering single note on the guitar. Never let it be said the Police were too uptight to work a groove, the song seems to insist.

“Canary in a Coalmine” is a return to a more comic approach to songwriting, painting a wry portrait of a socialite who can’t survive outside the rarified air of her wealth. Featuring the immortal couplet “You say you want to spend the winter in Firenze / You’re so afraid to catch a dose of influenza,” the song catches the band at their most upbeat, with the guitar and bass trading licks throughout. A ringing set of piano notes, smeared out by an echo, add an almost Beatlesesque touch to the brief bridge. The light touch is brief; for the next song, “Voices Inside My Head,” we’re back with another bass driven groove as the band explores a pure funk jam. The solo instrument here is really Copeland’s drums, as he explores different fills under the relentless scratch and throb of the guitar and drums. In the outro, the groove remains but the guitar’s itchy texture is peeled back, leaving a barer dub heartbeat.

“Bombs Away” is the sole Copeland songwriting credit on the album, and his trademark sardonic wit is on full display with the story of an incompetent general and corrupt president who both dream of the charms of a “guerilla girl.” Andy Summers is taken off the leash for a blistering solo and multiple overdubbed descant lines over the last chorus.

The easiest song for a bus full of teenagers to sing along to! “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” opens the second side of the album with an instantly iconic guitar riff that falls back to a repeated rhythm on the supertonic, over a a walking bass line and some of Sting’s finest rhyming dictionary writing. The song, though slight, may be one of the best examples of their pop songwriting genius: a full intro sound, stripped back to minimal instrumentation over a repetitive verse, augmented with full harmony vocals on the pre-chorus, and an insanely catchy singalong chorus. Sting has claimed that this was his attempt to pay tribute to early rock and roll like “Da Doo Ron Ron”; then again, he’s also claimed the lyrics are about the use of simplistic words by politicians to manipulate and deceive. I say it’s about dancing, and the pure joy of three insanely skilled musicians playing together at the top of their craft.

The same can’t be said for “Behind My Camel”; indeed, both Sting and Stewart Copeland disliked Andy Summers’ debut solo compositional contribution that they refused to play on it. (Copeland believes the name of the song was both a tribute by Summers to the Middle Eastern inspired guitar riff and because, in his words, “You know what you find behind a camel, right? A monumental pile of sh*t.”) The best aspect of the song is its brevity; at just two minutes and 53 seconds, it seems to last far longer.

Fortunately, “Man in a Suitcase” proves a successful return to the pop-reggae blend of “Canary in a Coalmine,” with a tune that figured heavily in the tour for Zenyatta but was never played live since. It’s a slight lyric, but one that has taken a near-permanent residence in my mind as I’ve had to travel more often. The couplet “Whole world’s my oyster/the hotel room’s my prison cell” resonates way more than it should. The band sounds as though they could play the song in their sleep. It’s a fun, and ultimately disposable, listen.

“Shadows in the Rain” sounds unclear as to what it wants to be: another minor key funk jam? A song about slowly losing one’s mind in hallucinations? The band seems to play it both ways at once, with shambolic outcomes. But there are still pleasures to be had here. Summers’ guitar, though low in the mix, does some sick things around the edges of the tune. And Copeland’s metronome-precise drumming is a masterclass in subtlety, as he drops a beat here, adds an extra splash of cymbal there. The only weak part of the jam might be Sting’s improvised vocals over the outro, which are half-baked and distracting. But that bass line! A heartbeat, a footfall, a rhythmic rock.

The band closes with a tightly knit Copeland instrumental, “The Other Way of Stopping,” that is a portrait of the group at their collective best. All the colors of Copeland’s drum kit are on display here in service of a simple melody that Sting and Summers play, first in unison and then diverging, with Sting’s bass climbing and diving on the chorus. When Summers’ guitar begins to overdub more and more lines into a guitar chorus at the end, it’s like a manifold path unfolding, and he gets the last word here as the band exercises the other way of stopping, which I think was meant by Copeland as a joke about running off a cliff but here plays more as a transformation.

The band seems to have enjoyed the material on the album but has voiced regret regarding the hurried recording sessions, and went as far as to re-record both “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” years later; the former was included on the band’s first greatest hits compilation, Every Breath You Take: The Singles but the latter was cut for running time and didn’t receive a release until 2000. But, a few weaker songs aside, Zenyatta remains a high point in the band’s discography and one of the last times that they would be a true triumvirate. When they returned to a studio five months later to begin recording their next album, the power dynamics had shifted. We’ll talk about that one next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The video of “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” has to be seen to believed. The band cheerily plays the song in the snow as Copeland films them with his ever-present Super8 video camera. The thin pretense of syncing the action with the song is quickly abandoned, as Copeland yanks the neck of Sting’s bass down to unblock his face, then pushes it up to block Sting’s; at one point all three of them are playing the guitar at once. At their best, this was a band that knew how to leverage goofiness in support of their music, for which there’s a lot to be said.

Eberhard Schoener, Video-Magic

Album of the Week, January 11, 2025

In the 1980s, before streaming services and the Internet, if you were a fan of an artist you often traded cassettes of that artist’s rarities—b-sides, bootleg recordings from live concerts, and maybe obscure appearances the artist made on other peoples’ albums. Today’s album falls solidly in the last category. I first heard the seriously off-kilter songs on today’s album thanks to a compilation tape made by my friend Catherine, and I was thrilled some years ago (10? 15?) when I found a copy of some of the works on vinyl.

Eberhard Schoener, born in 1938 in Stuttgart, Germany, began his career as a classical violinist and conductor, but turned to new ways of making music in the 1970s. He was one of the early adopters of the Moog synthesizer, and also incorporated Indonesian elements in his music. But the oddest career development came when he invited his friend Andy Summers, who he knew from progressive rock circles, to join the recording of his new album, Flashback. Andy’s group, The Police, was still hungry for gigs and they all went along, appearing on several songs on the album. Later that year Sting and Summers participated in another Schoener recording, Video-Magic.

Manager Miles Copeland, however, thought the work didn’t fit the Police’s image, and it was quietly suppressed. Schoener, however, knew he had gold, and a series of reissues kept the material alive, most combining tracks from Video-Magic with songs from Flashback and the prior album Trance-Formation to make a sort of “greatest hits” compilation, which was issued with various covers and titles. Confusingly, one of the titles it was issued under in 1981 was Video-Magic; it’s this compilation that we’re looking at today.

“Trans-Am” was the lead off track on Flashback and also plays that role here. An oceanic swell of what at first seems to be pure noise and is then revealed to be a passing airplane is underpinned by a brass fanfare with heavy reverb. The lead is played on a high synthesizer line, and Sting scats his way through the vocal introduction as Stewart Copeland builds a huge drum cascade below him. The lyrics aren’t exactly Police quality: “here am I/so high/in the sky…” and the tune quickly segues into “Why Don’t You Answer” with the sound of a dialing rotary phone. This second track may be the musical standout: with no progressive rock pretensions, the backing track plays as pure “Neue Deutsche Welle” (and wouldn’t have been out of place on my radio show about that New Wave variant). Sting sings a harmony-tracked chorus pleading “why don’t you answer” that wouldn’t have been out of place on a later Police album. Unfortunately the song is more of an idea than a fully developed composition; the lyrics peter out and we’re left with a mood piece.

“Natural High” is our first Video-Magic tune proper, and it’s really something. Some Andy Summers guitar work at the beginning, playing against an organ line, a high synthesizer line, some in the pocket drumming of a kind we rarely get to hear in the Police (possibly because it’s not Stewart; he didn’t participate in the Video-Magic sessions), and then Sting’s vocal. When Sting’s vocal enters you are reminded of two things: his younger tenor voice was really high, and it had limits. Schoener’s melody pushes that voice up to the limit from the very first phrase: “Who needs the sky / just watch me fly / I’m on a natural high.” I haven’t ever heard Schoener speak, but for me the text setting here is a reminder that he is not a native speaker; why else would the word “the” be set as the high point of a phrase, on a high E flat an octave above middle C? Something I spent time learning as I began figuring out how to apply my own singing voice was that Sting’s rock’n’roll tenor was applied differently than a classical voice, and you can really hear it here, in the pinched high vocals of the upper end. But a lot of the rest of the vocal line is quite high too, and there the vocal production is unstrained, open and well supported. The middle section develops a really nice groove against a more innovative drum pattern. But it’s that chorus that keeps coming back as if to say, “yes, you weren’t imagining it, this is ridiculous.”

“Signs of Emotion” is the sole track from Trance-Formation here, and features Andy Summers on guitar in a bluesy, lovely opening statement over a string-like synthesizer; for a second it’s almost in Mark Knopfler territory. Then Schoener’s synths take over for a short bridge, giving a purely electronic swell of sound in response to the opening statement. When Summers returns, his accompaniment is augmented by pipe organ with distant choral voices behind.

The title song from Flashback opens with a trumpet fanfare on the synth and a wordless melody from Sting that’s once again in the high upper range of his voice. Schoener appears to have really enjoyed pushing Sting to the upper limits and this track is no exception. Here Schoener has deployed a Beatlesesque array of sounds beneath Sting: strings, horns, celeste-like keys, and then a squelchy bass lead, all with Stewart Copeland’s relentless drumming and some textural guitar work. The lyrics that enter in the second verse are a reprise (flashback?) to “Flashback.” The track ends with an actual brass fanfare.

“Octagon” is a different sound world with a slightly funky edge. Sting (playing with an orchestral percussion section) gives us the funk and duets with Summers who brings some of the rock and roll. Sting gets an extended bass duet with Schoener on the Hammond B3 next, and you get to hear some of his chops but he seems content to just push the work forward. Which is a good move. “Octagon” is the longest work on the album and, while Schoener keeps it varied, it’s a bit much as it gets into the sixth minute.

The next two works are more like chamber music than orchestral works. “San Francisco Waitress,” scored for Fender Rhodes electric piano, alto saxophone, and tenor vocalist, sets to music a short story in the form of a newspaper article. This is Sting, actually having fun for a change, to the extent of ending a song with a dad joke. The track itself is easily my favorite on the album. Not too overdone — the only part that is in dubious taste is when Sting and saxophonist Olaf Kübler both reach for the same high note at the same time, with slightly different conclusions about its exact location, and most everything else is sensitively set. Even the antagonist of the piece, the aggrieved Tom Horsley who takes a waitress to small claims court for breaking a date, is presented sympathetically. It’s genuinely fun. And the wonderful thing is it is all true! The original newspaper article appeared in the New York Times in 1978 under the headline “Vain Hopes Remain Thus for Admirer Who Sued,” and the quotes from Byron and Quintilian were both courtesy of Judge Richard P. Figoni, the judge cited by name in the song.

“Code-Word Elvis,” the story of a sad sack twenty-year-old in the Lonely Hearts column with a rich imaginative life, is set initially to a string quartet with guitar, spare drums, and occasional saxophone. The very best thing about it may be the word painting of the correspondence address “Postbox Elvis, 57938,” which improbably becomes a statement of private triumph for the narrator. As Sting sings the fantasia on the address, a flute joins in to underscore the untethered joy of the narrator’s anticipation: surely his love of racing sport, action movies, and the King will bring him the correspondence he craves. It’s a tightly composed little poem; I’d love to hear more like it.

That’s not what we get with “Powerslide,” a brief instrumental from Flashback in progressive rock mode that closes the compilation. It’s a brisk little bit of synths where the best thing is the bass solo in the bridge and Stewart Copeland’s drumming, and it brings the Police’s tour through the German progressive rock world to a fascinating end.

Not that the Police were done touring; not by a long shot. Following the success of Reggatta de Blanc, they hit the road for a long stretch that strained the connections between the band, but also started to build their songwriting muscles in new and unexpected ways. We’ll check in on the record they made following that journey next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

The Police, Reggatta de Blanc

Album of the Week, January 4, 2025

The story of good music is frequently the story of the collision between different ways of performing and hearing music. Cécile McLorin Salvant mashed the sounds of Irish lamentation with British art pop music over a jazz background. Alice Coltrane intersected Indian devotional music with free jazz. Duke Ellington collided Tchaikovsky and big band. And the musicians we’ll be listening to for the next little bit intersected punk rock with reggae and jazz, in differing amounts, and created something entirely new.

Gordon Sumner was born in 1951 in Northumberland, England, the eldest child of a hairdresser and a milkman who used to be a fitter at an engineering works, in the shadow of Wallsend Shipyards. He attended University of Warwick at Coventry but found he preferred playing and writing music, so left after a term. He worked a series of odd jobs, eventually getting certified as a teacher, and taught at a prep school for two years. During this period he played jazz in the evenings and weekends with a series of bands including the Phoenix Jazzmen, where a yellow and black striped sweater earned him the nickname “Sting,” and Last Exit, a jazz fusion band.

He was a bassist, singer and songwriter during this period and was actively writing songs, many of which would be recycled for material in his later projects. Last Exit moved to London in 1977 to try to make it big, but ended up breaking up, with half the band heading back to Newcastle. Sting’s co-founder in Last Exit, keyboardist Gerry Richardson, became music director for the band of a Trinidadian-born singer/songwriter named Billy Ocean. And Sting joined a new project with drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Henry (or Henri) Padovani; they called the band The Police, inspired by the American Copeland, whose father was an intelligence operative for the CIA. Copeland had been playing in a progressive rock band called Curved Air; he had met Padovani after a Curved Air gig and invited him to join the band.

The new trio recorded a single, “Fall Out,” that got some press (Mick Jagger wrote the review in Sounds magazine). About the same time, musician Mike Howlett invited Sting to join a project called Strontium 90, and Sting brought Copeland along. In the band they met guitarist Andy Summers, ten years older than Sting and Copeland, who had played with Eric Burdon and the Animals and psychedelic artist Kevin Ayers. Sting was growing dissatisfied with Padovani’s limited playing, and invited Summers to join the Police as their fourth member; ultimately Summers issued an ultimatum that if he was to stay, Padovani had to go, and the Police were a trio again. Desperate for cash, the trio bleached their hair blond for a Wrigley’s gum commercial.

They got signed to A&M Records and recorded an album, taking advantage of Sting’s hot songwriting streak that produced songs like “Can’t Stand Losing You,” “So Lonely,” and “Roxanne.” Outlandos D’Amour hit the upper reaches of both the US and UK charts, and after an exhausting tour the band headed back to the studio, with lots of time but fewer songs prepared. The result was Reggatta de Blanc, which I always translated as a kid as “the white boat race” but which apparently actually meant “white people reggae.”

(This is what it’s like to write about The Police. There’s so much backstory that you end up writing five or six paragraphs before you even get to the music.)

Fortunately for the longevity of the band, the very first song on the album was an all time classic. Sting says he came up with “Message in a Bottle” on tour, and that Andy Summers added the hook, that incredible arpeggio that underpins the song. The actual recording, while it sounds simple, is built of overdubs, with both Summers and Copeland layering their parts. Over it Sting sings one of the great melodies of his career. There’s not much reggae in this song, except in Sting’s voice, which at this phase of his career is notable for the altitude his tenor could reach and the slight echo of a Jamaican patois around the edges. Sting had acknowledged listening to Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” in writing “So Lonely,” but he must have been listening to more to pick up that depth of an accent in his singing voice. (Elvis Costello notoriously once said, “Somebody should clip Sting round the head and tell him to stop singing in that ridiculous Jamaican accent.”)

But even with all these factors going on, the fundamental genius of the song is built into it from the start. Those swirling arpeggios at the outset are echoed in Sting’s vocal line, which drops from the fifth of the minor scale down to the third and back, with variations on the fourth and second of the scale. But Sting stays floating above the tonic until the chorus, where he hammers it three times before popping back up to the third and back down (“I’ll send an SOS to the world”). And he repeats the next phrase three times, all on the tonic (“I hope that someone gets my…”), while the chords change underneath. And then we realize that we’ve actually been suspending above the fifth of the scale for the chorus, and when he drops to “message in a bottle” it’s only a half step down but it feels as though the bottom of the world has dropped out from under you. The arrangement on the record reinforces this, with the guitar ceasing its arpeggiation and only Sting’s bass reinforcing the pounding loneliness. Stewart Copeland adds to the feeling of drift here; playing a driving beat through the majority of the song, he gives a syncopated fill on the high hat on the chorus that reinforces the feeling of loneliness and alienation. Finally, there’s the coda, the “sending out an SOS” on repeat, over Andy Summers’ weeping guitar line. There are relatively few perfect pop songs, and the Police led off side 1 with one of them. It was their first song to go to Number One on the UK chart.

How do you follow a masterpiece? If you’re the Police, often with an instrumental. “Reggatta de Blanc” shows a couple of key Police traits: the virtuosity of all three players, the degree to which Jamaican music was occupying their collective imaginations, and the joy that they apparently found in playing music with each other. With a sustained note on the guitar and Copeland beating double time on the hi-hat, Sting counts the band off and Copeland immediately lets loose with one of his virtuosic drum fills, this time crackling on the rim of the snare. Sting plays a bouncy arpeggio that rocks back and forth between the two opening chords and Andy Summers plays fills until the trio locks into a rock beat, playing a series of chords over an insistent eight-note ground on the tonic in the bass. This is where the vocals come in, and they’re pure filler, a set of “cha!”s and what can only be described as a vocal exercise: “Eeyo, eeyo, eeyo-yo.” It’s fun, almost cinematic in the moods it delivers, and utterly inconsequential. Setlist.fm says that the band played it live 42 times between 1979 and 1982, but almost twice as many times in the years before they broke up in medley with “Can’t Stand Losing You.” That version was in the setlists when they did their 2007-2008 reunion tour, and both Sting and Stewart Copeland played the medley on their solo tours in the past year.

If “Reggatta de Blanc” became an unlikely live staple, “It’s Alright for You” appears to have been the opposite, a filler track only played live once by the band. Written by Copeland with words by Sting, the song is aggressive and driving but the lyrics seem to be mostly throwaway, with some unfortunate period notes in the verses (the “limp wrist tight fist contract no twist” verse in particular makes this a challenging karaoke choice).

“Bring on the Night,” by contrast, has enjoyed a long life for a song not even written for the band. Like many of Sting’s songs, on paper it sounds hopelessly pretentious. Written while Sting was in Last Exit, the song was originally titled “Carrion Prince,” a reference to the Ted Hughes poem “King of Carrion” (though I didn’t know it when I was first listening, at the same time that I was falling down a Ted Hughes rabbit hole), and was apparently written with Pontius Pilate in mind. (Worse yet: Sting later read The Executioner’s Song, and, feeling that “Bring on the Night” was a fit to Gary Gilmore’s death wish, now says “I sing it with him in mind.”) You don’t have to know any of that to enjoy the song; in fact, you might be better off not knowing. In the version on the album it’s a reggae-inflected romp, with Summers and Sting exchanging phrases and ideas throughout on their respective instruments. We’ll hear this song again. The next song, “Deathwish” — not so much. This wisp of a song, credited to all three members of the band, hasn’t been played live by anyone since 1981. It’s got a striking intro, played with open fifths in a syncopated beat, but the lyrics are blah. It doesn’t have a real chorus, just an instrumental riff. It’s in and out so you can get on to the next song.

And the next song is worth it. “Walking on the Moon” was the band’s second Number One in the UK. It continues the subdued mood of the chorus from “Message in a Bottle” and stretches it out in an eerie, echoey track that is simple, subversively melodic, unexpectedly modal. The backbone of the track is the bass line, which is just six notes in syncopation: subtonic (x2), tonic, mediant, supertonic, subtonic. A ringing chord from Andy Summers punctuates the riff after the tonic is played. Stewart Copeland plays some of the finest work of his career, giving a weightless feeling with his snare work and, especially, the shift into a triple meter for a full sixteen measures after the last chorus. The track is in a minor key but feels somehow upbeat, as though one is traveling meters with each step. Sting has said he knew he had made it as a songwriter when he heard an intern in the hospital where his first child was born whistling “Walking on the Moon” as he walked by in the hallway. When I first heard dub, years later, I understood the musical point of departure for the song.

If Copeland was in the land of the sublime on the previous track, he swings to the ridiculous on this next song, opining “The other ones are complete bulls**t.” He has sole writing credit on “On Any Other Day,” and it sounds more like his later solo work than a Police track. I can’t find a mention of a single live performance on Setlist, which is a pity because the song is bratty fun with its story of a middle aged man who hits one minor obstacle after another on his birthday. Unfortunately, the obstacle Copeland picks for the last line of the chorus, “My fine young son has turned out gay,” hasn’t aged especially well.

“The Bed’s Too Big Without You” was the last single released from the album, getting a release as an extra 45 included in a collection, Six Pack, that also includes the Police’s first five singles (excluding “Fall Out”). It’s the most steretypically “reggae” of the tracks on the album and is deceptively simple, given its tragic history (Sting is said to have written it in memory of his first girlfriend, who supposedly committed suicide in the distraught aftermath of their breakup). The mono mix of the song, which is more like a full re-recording and which is only available on the Message in a Box compilation, is even more stripped down; the sixteen bars before the last chorus, just bass and drums, are as minimal as this band ever got.

“Contact” is another Stewart Copeland track that doesn’t appear to have ever been played live. It’s fine but nothing memorable. The same cannot be said for his last songwriting credit on the album, “Does Everyone Stare,” which opens with a piano figure that he supposedly wrote in college and has a moment of pure serendipity after the first chorus, a swelling operatic tenor moment that, according to Copeland, came from a radio broadcast that happened to be picked up by the poor wiring of his home recording studio when he was recording the demo. It also has some of the funniest writing on the album (“I never noticed the size of my feet/till I kicked you in the shins”) as well as some of the deepest self-pity (“Last of all I’m sorry ‘cause you never asked for this/I can see I’m not your type, and my shots will always miss”). It was a perfect song for a thirteen-year-old me.

The last song, “No Time This Time,” was written by Sting as a b-side for “So Lonely,” and was added to fill out the album’s running time. It sounds more like Outlandos D’Amour, with a rushed vocal performance and a strong punk flavor. The band performed it live a handful of times, but it probably deserved more; it has a huge energy and is eminently singable.

The Police were one of the rare bands where the second album was stronger than the first, and they would continue to build this trajectory with the follow-up. But at the time they were still doing various side projects, and next week we’ll listen to the most unusual of the projects from this period.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

What’s up in early 2025 for the Album of the Week?

I’ve been writing about jazz (and some other music) on this blog now for … a while! The first real post in the series (Eva Cassidy’s Live at Blues Alley) happened in January 2022, so almost three years now. And we’ve written about some really great stuff—Trane, Bill Evans, Cécile McLorin Salvant, CTI.

What I’ve found most interesting about writing these columns is that, the more I stretch outside my comfort zone, the more interesting things get… and when I return to my comfort zone, things are richer for the detour.

So the upcoming columns. I’ve been thinking about the narrative we’ve heard so far… how traditional jazz went avant garde, splintered into rock-influenced fusion and funk-influenced jazz-pop, and returned to something like a traditionalist stance… all within the scope of about 20 years, from 1964 to the end of the 1970s.

But what happened then? Jazz is still around, but the journey it went on in the 1980s was very different. And along the way it had some flirtations with some very different kinds of music.

So we’re going to start next week exploring some of the kinds of music that touched jazz in the 1980s—but we’ll explore them on their own terms, not just as jazz adjacencies. And we’re going to visit what happened to some of the artists we’ve been following as well as how other kinds of music were changed by jazz. And we’re going to do it all through the lens of one of the most successful popular artists of the 1980s.

Hope that’s whetted your appetite, and will see you next week!

Duke Pearson, Merry Ole Soul

Album of the Week, December 28, 2024

We’ve come across Duke Pearson twice before in this series, both times in Blue Note recordings by the great McCoy Tyner, where he was the producer on Tyner’s Extensions and Expansions. Pearson had been with Blue Note artists since the early 1960s, when he joined the Donald Byrd-Pepper Adams Quintet. In 1963, Pearson made his mark in two important ways: first, he was the arranger for four of the five tracks on Byrd’s A New Perspective, including “Cristo Redentor,” which became a hit.

Second, he became the chief A&R (artists & repertoire) man for Blue Note following the death of Ike Quebec. In this role he is credited with shaping the sound of Blue Note during the bulk of the 1960s. He also recorded seven albums between 1964 and 1969 on Blue Note, beginning with the auspiciously titled Wahoo! and ending with Merry Ole Soul, which as is traditional for Christmas albums finished recording in August of 1969 (and as is traditional for 1960s Blue Note albums was recorded at Van Gelder Studios). He was joined for the sessions by Bob Cranshaw (from Sonny Rollins’ band) on bass, Mickey Roker on drums, and Airto Moreira on percussion.

We’ve heard the opening track “Sleigh Ride” in this blog before; it kicked off my 2022 Christmas jazz hour on my Exfiltration Radio series, “Riding in a Wonderland.” At the time, I wrote, “This uber-cool take on “Sleigh Ride” is viewed through the prism of spiritual jazz, with a drone in the bass and drums that’ll knock your socks off.” Well, that’s true, but there are some really spectacular fine details in the arrangement as well that are worth expanding upon. The open chords in Pearson’s introduction, the pervasive swing, and the genius switch from piano to celeste for that opening melody: all perfection. And listen to what the bass is doing in that opening! That syncopated drone on that fifth of the scale, in octaves, remains the steady pulse throughout the entire intro, first verse, first solo, all the way into the bridge where suddenly the arrangement snaps into a more conventional bebop pattern, but only for sixteen bars! And the stride-influenced piano rumble that Pearson adopts on the second bar (“there’s a birthday party at the home of Farmer Gray…”)!

Pearson takes “The Little Drummer Boy” at breakneck speed, but still gives Mickey Roker plenty of time to make his mark in a way that the prior song didn’t really permit. Here the drummer gives a massive marching-band style introduction across the entire drum kit as the bass and the lower chords of the piano keep the drone going. When the full melody arrives, Cranshaw gets to cut loose a little, boogeying up and down the octave but still returning to that ground—and at the end of each verse, Roker returns to cut loose, here with a splashy cymbal, there with a roll.

Pearson plays Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” more straight, though there’s still more than a touch of the blues about his playing. Only the entrance of the celeste at the end signals Pearson’s imaginative rearrangements. The next track, “Jingle Bells,” is more freely adapted, with Airto’s Latin percussion (doubled by Roker on the wood blocks) signaling the brisk samba tempo. Cranshaw gets to join in the reindeer games with a wandering bass line throughout.

The duo of Roker and Airto get “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” going at something like a breakneck speed, as though a samba party were happening at 78 RPM instead of 45. Pearson follows suit, gleefully improvising atop Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s Christmas classic, and Cranshaw follows, briskly ripping through two choruses and a bridge. Santa has never samba’d so hard.

Pearson turns serious on one of the few non-secular songs on the album. “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is an African-American spiritual that was first collected in Religious Folk Songs of the Negro as Sung on the Plantations, compiled by Thomas P. Fenner, the first director of music at what is now Hampton University. Pearson brings church to the performance, with inflections of gospel and blues in its depths.

We’re back with the martial marching beat of “Little Drummer Boy” for “Wassail Song,” otherwise known as “Here We Come A-Wassailing.” Pearson and Cranshaw have an extended improvisation on the theme in the lower octaves before the main tune returns and the procession moves away. But “Silent Night” is back in the sound world of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and gospel, as though Franz Gruber were a southern pastor.

“O Little Town of Bethlehem” is played as straight as it gets: a piano solo, with no blues around the edges. This might have been Pearson playing in church. It brings a quiet note to end a set that has gone in every other possible direction already.

Pearson’s collection was the only Christmas album released on Blue Note Records during the 1960s, and is lesser known compared to some of the great jazz Christmas classics like Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas. But it’s a great collection that spans a variety of styles and is well worth adding to your Christmas playlist.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s the playlist of Christmas jazz from 2022 that opens with Pearson’s rendition of “Sleigh Ride.” It might be time to make another one of these…

Boston Camerata, A Medieval Christmas

Album of the Week, December 21, 2024

I’ve featured the Boston Camerata in this series before (and even before this series was a thing). The early music ensemble, directed for many years by Joel Cohen, was responsible for introducing me to the sound of Middle English, Renaissance and Sacred Harp music, and a great many other things. And before I started collecting old records, I thought they had recorded three Christmas records for Nonesuch: Sing We Noel first, then A Renaissance Christmas, and finally A Medieval Christmas, which I thought had been released in 1991 when it came out on CD.

It turns out I had things backwards. As I wrote last year, the Nonesuch A Renaissance Christmas was a re-recording of an earlier performance from before the Camerata had signed to a major label. And it turns out that A Medieval Christmas was originally released in 1975, meaning that it precedes Sing We Noel by a full three years.

That difference is significant. Thanks in part to Cohen, as well as to British early music artists like Paul Hillier and David Munrow, the standards for early music performance were rising rapidly, and certain scarcities like authentic period instruments and unusual voice parts (like countertenors) were starting to be more widely available. Indeed, the scarcity of early instruments was, um, instrumental in the founding of the Camerata; it began as a group dedicated to demonstrating the rare antique instruments in Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, and this album was recorded at the MFA.

But during this transitional period, Cohen still had to work with the forces he could find, including some interesting vocalists. Charles Rhodes, the countertenor who is featured prominently on the Franco-Provençal setting of the prophecy of the Angel Gabriel, “Oiet, virgines,” is probably the most notorious example; he has an expressive voice, but his vocal production is a little uneven and he strays a little toward the pinched and strained side of the high tenor sound. But it’s still mesmerizing, and that’s due at least in part to the program and the instrumentalists.

Cohen can be reliably counted on to deliver the most incredibly obscure music, whether a cantillation of the Torah or a 10th century Spanish plainchant, and then to weave them together seamlessly into a single performance. When the conductus “Adest sponsus” enters, it’s with great vigor that the percussion and the shawms set the tempo, as if for a procession; the album closing conductus “Orientus partibus” is actually performed as a recessional, which contributes greatly to the mood if not to the audibility.

There is also some fairly spectacular programming of related tunes together, with the familiar macaronic carol “In dulci jubilo” paired with its plainchant antecedent, “Congaugent hodie,” as well as readings in Middle English courtesy of Nicholas Linfield (who also did the readings on Sing We Noel).

The album as a whole can be taken as many things: a scholarly illustration of medieval musical practices (especially if you read Cohen’s comprehensive liner notes while listening), a window into alternate musical Christmas traditions, or just something to put on and meditatively listen. Or all of the above, which is what I plan to do this week. Next time, we’ll get to something a little funkier.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Boston Pops, Pops Christmas Party

Album of the Week, December 14, 2024

For about 100,000 people every year in my adopted home town of Boston, the Holiday Pops are a major attraction and marker of the holiday season. The modern institution as we know it today—a series of December concerts with repertoire both classical and popular, garnished by a certain man in a big red coat—has existed since 1973. But the Boston Pops has been programming holiday fare for much longer. Its iconic “Sleigh Ride,” Leroy Anderson’s feature for whinnying trumpet, sleigh bells and slapstick, was written in 1948 (based on an idea the composer got in a 1946 heat wave) and premiered in a concert in May of that year. And the Pops has long had a deep bench of holiday arrangements as well. As far as I can tell, the Pops Christmas story starts in earnest with today’s album, 1959’s A Pops Christmas Party.

The album is a combination of arrangements, medleys, and works written especially for the orchestra, along with light classical pieces that carry the flavor of the season—in other words, a typical Pops album. And the hands of three of the Pops’ great arrangers and composers—Anderson, Jack Mason, and Richard Hayman—are all over it.

“A Christmas Festival” kicks us off in fine Pops style. Most Holiday Pops concerts start with a fanfare, frequently a medley of familiar Christmas carols, and this Leroy Anderson arrangement is the grandaddy of them all. Fiedler takes the opening in a stately tempo and then gradually accelerates up to something more like a slow modern Pops tempo. The genius of Anderson shows in the moving eighth note accompaniment to “Deck the Hall with Boughs of Holly,” which manages to be both traditional and ultramodern at once, and there are touches of this throughout—the passing trumpet notes at the end of “Deck,” the moving eighth note pizzicati and winds that mark the edges of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and so on throughout. I think my favorite moment, though, is the few notes played on the tubular bells in the midst of “Silent Night”—just before the winds provide the rapid-fire accompaniment that signals the beginning of “Jingle Bells” and the approaching finale. The syncopation in the brass that begins the second verse ends by morphing into what feels for all the world like a can-can on “O Come, All Ye Faithful” before it turns into a massive orchestral finale, with all hands on deck. Here Fiedler takes the tempo at something approaching breakneck speed as the organ roars the final notes.

The record’s performance of “White Christmas” is as sedate and mystical as I’ve ever heard it. Though the celeste is not quite in unison with the pizzicato strings on the two out of tempo notes, still the strings play in gorgeous muted harmony under the concertmaster’s solo. (Aside: it was often a custom before I joined the TFC that the musicians would toss pennies at Pops concertmaster Tamara Smirnova’s feet after she completed the solo, signaling their approval.) This version, the original arrangement by composer Jack Mason, lacks the choral coda and key change that has been the Pops’ practice since I joined.

By contrast, the Pops’ “Sleigh Ride” hasn’t changed a note since its inception, save perhaps for the arrival of Sparkle the Magical Christmas Unicorn in recent years. It remains a perfect bit of musical scene painting, with literal slapstick to play the role of the cracking whip. Mason’s arrangement of “Winter Wonderland,” which follows, has since disappeared, victim of its midcentury ballroom dancing aesthetic. But they’ve brought back Léon Jessel’s “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,” courtesy of a brilliant bit of animation that illustrates the journey and travails of the titular toy. (It doesn’t seem to be online, but there’s a short preview on Facebook.)

In a reversal of current Pops practice, the classical works are saved for the opening of the second half of the album. The “Dream Pantomime” from Engelbert Humperdinck’s light opera Hansel and Gretel seems to have fallen by the wayside as a holiday piece, but it’s lovely here, with delicate work from the strings throughout as the angels come to surround and protect the lost children as they sleep.

Mozart’s “Sleigh Ride,” from his German Dances, is also an unlikely Christmas work, but is at least more commonly played—if not overly familiar from high school orchestra concerts. The Pops play it straight here, with the emergence of the sleigh bells seeming to signal the sleigh breaking into the open after passing through the dense orchestration. The “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite of course remains a beloved holiday classic to this day, appearing mostly recently on the Pops’ program in its Duke Ellington re-arrangement (“Sugar Rum Cherry”) in 2021 (during which time I created the cocktails Sugar Rum Cherry Nos. 1 and 2).

“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is the sole arrangement by veteran Pops hand Richard Hayman to appear on the album, and is another one that lingers in the Pops repertoire to this day. This 1959 recording, appearing just ten years after the introduction of the Johnny Marks song by Gene Autry, sounds just as brilliant as modern performances do. Hayman loved to shoehorn little details into every corner of an arrangement, like the extra whip cracks that appear around the edges and the bassoon counterpoint to the tune in the last chorus, and they’re crystal clear here.

“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” might be the most enduring of the Mason arrangements in the Pops repertoire, or at least the part that appears here. The 1934 Coots/Gillespie tune receives every trick in the arranger’s book, including the pizzicato countermelody (which the TFC always “bum bum bum”s along to during modern performances, the big band swing at the conclusion of the arrangement, and the omnipresent sleigh bells in the hands of what must surely be a tired percussionist.

The success of Pops Christmas Party and its sequels played a role in establishing the Boston Pops in the format they still follow today: a spring of light classics and popular music, a December full of holiday cheer. It’s a tradition that I became a part of when I joined the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in 2005, and it’s still fun to hear “A Christmas Festival,” “Sleigh Ride,” “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and sing the vocal version of Mason’s “White Christmas” year after year. Next time we’ll check in with another holiday tradition, albeit this time one that’s more unique to my family.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

The Ramsey Lewis Trio, More Sounds of Christmas

Album of the Week, December 7, 2024

There never seems to be enough time in the holiday calendar to write about all the Christmas music that there is. That’s partly because I like a wide variety of the stuff, of course, and partly because there is, in fact, an awful lot of it. Some Christmas albums are stone classics, and some … aren’t but are still pretty good.

Such is the case with today’s album, recorded in October 1964 and released just in time for that year’s holiday season. The title, a reference to the Lewis trio’s 1961 classic Sound of Christmas, screams “not putting in a lot of effort.” But this isn’t a run of the mill band going through the motions; this is the Ramsey Lewis Trio, and in fact the same trio that we heard on the 1961 recording, with Eldee Young on bass and Issac “Red” Holt on drums (with a little assist from Cleveland Eaton and Steve McCall on some of the tracks). The only difference is that Riley Hampton’s string arrangements don’t return; in their place are charts by bandleader King Fleming and saxophonist Will Jackson. The end product isn’t a stone classic, but it still has some great moments and is a good way to ease into the holiday.

“Snowbound,” a song by bandleader Russell Faith with Clarence Kehner made famous by Sarah Vaughan, starts us off in a contemplative mood. Ramsey Lewis performs the tune with subtle accompaniment by the string orchestra, then improvises while the orchestra takes the theme. The effect is meditative and evocative; one can imagine Lewis staring out a window into the falling snow… at least until the trombone solo crests at the peak of the bridge. (Fun fact: Trombonist John Avant went on to play in the Sun Ra Arkestra.)

From the slightly obscure mid-20th-century pop vein, we drop right into full holiday mode with “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” The arrangement takes us through day three with the strings, sleigh bells, and celeste only, before Lewis’s piano enters with the rest of the trio, playing a bluesy chorus. If you’ve sat through (or, ahem, sung) a few too many rounds of 12 Days, this arrangement is a pretty good way to allow you to reimagine it, albeit by discarding the structure and tune of the song pretty completely after the first minute.

The Lewis original “Egg Nog,” played just by the trio, is a full-throated twelve bar blues in which the band demonstrates their completely soulful mastery. Stride piano styles? Check, in the bridge. In-the-pocket drumming? Check. Deeply swung bass rhythms? Check. Only the celeste, played by Lewis on the intro and outro, takes this into Christmas music territory. It’s a good opportunity to whip up a batch of Charles Mingus’s eggnog recipe and sit by the Christmas tree.

What is there to say about “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” that hasn’t already been said? Well, as I was reminded watching the classic 1964 Christmas special last night, maybe it’s worthwhile remembering that the beloved Christmas mascot first found life in a poem published by Montgomery Ward in 1939, written by Robert L. May, a copywriter who was deeply in debt due to his cost of his dying wife’s medical treatments for cancer. The poem became a book due to May’s persistence, who convinced reluctant book publishers (who figured there wasn’t a market for a poem that already had six million copies in print thanks to Montgomery Ward) to take a chance on the children’s book market. At the beginning of the baby boom, this was a good bet; the book sold like hotcakes, and May was subsequently able to convince his sister’s husband, Johnny Marks, to write a song about the red-nosed reindeer. In the initial recording, performed by an initially reluctant Gene Autry, Rudolph completed his ascension to the highest stages of the secular American Christmas pantheon. —Okay, so maybe there was a little to say about the song after all. In this case, Lewis’s trio and the orchestra swing the song hard, driven by Red Holt’s monstrous syncopated drumming. (I listened to this song five times as I wrote this and am convinced I’ll be feeling that anticipatory downbeat in my dreams tonight.)

The trio seems to take the heavy swing of “Rudolph” as a challenge to see if they can swing “Jingle Bells” even harder. This is a showpiece for Eldee Young, who solos the entire song with what must have been a finger-bleeding pizzicato, accompanied by some pretty first class scat singing, taking us out of the first half. And it’s Young’s bass that takes us into his composition “Plum Puddin’” to open the second side. Lewis and the trio take us on a quick ride through what’s essentially a jam, with Lewis executing filigreed runs that veer into blue notes and back out again as Young and Holt lock into a tight rhythm that never lets up throughout.

“Snowfall,” a 1941 hit by Claude Thornhill and his orchestra, recaptures some of the mood of the album opener, but this time the strings are in control with less input from Lewis, until he starts jamming bits of what sound like a countermelody of his own “Sound of Christmas” at the end. Lewis’s trio arrangement of “We Three Kings” is more adventurous, driven both by Lewis’s bluesy piano and Holt’s heavily syncopated snare work. At the back of it all, Eldee Young’s bass weaves in and out with a descending line that echoes the magi’s journey all the way to the fleeting appearance of major-key tonality in the chorus, punctuated by huge drumrolls from Holt. Lewis closes it out in a minor mode with a trill on the minor third.

Lewis slides into Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” with an eight-bar major key intro that suspends us on the fifth until he finally brings us down to the melody. It’s the sort of trick that “My Favorite Things”-era John Coltrane would have soaked in for half an hour or more; here it’s just another tool in Lewis’s belt. The rest of the performance is pretty standard for the trio, “just” outstanding bluesy swinging.

“Little Drummer Boy” must surely be the weirdest example of the interconnectedness of the 20th century; how many Christmas songs have an indirect connection to the Nazi takeover of Austria? It was the Trapp Family Singers (of “Sound of Music” fame) who first performed Katherine Davis’s “Carol of the Drum,” before Harry Simeone took it and rearranged it into the form we know today. Lewis does a little rearranging of his own, with the strings playing a repeated drone on the downbeat before Lewis takes an extended bluesy jam out of the end of the first verse, and stays in that vein until he glissandos right into a key change. The arrangement has him continue to jam his way through the end, until he picks up the melody once more as a tag at the end.

More Sounds of Christmas provides sufficient evidence that the persistence of the Ramsey Lewis Trio—ten years, twenty-something albums, a top ten hit—had as much to do with Young and Holt as it did with Lewis. We’ll listen to more of their recordings another time. but this week I recommend you spin this platter of bluesy holiday cheer as you’re dragging those ornaments out of storage. Next time we’ll flip over to something a little more traditional.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Wayne Shorter, Celebration Vol. 1

Album of the Week, November 30, 2024

When Wayne Shorter died, on March 2, 2023, in many ways it marked the end of an era. By the time of his passing he was being hailed as America’s greatest living jazz composer, and the “Footprints Quartet” that we heard last week had a reputation as one of the greatest improvisational bands in history. In some ways, though, his death accelerated the release of material by the quartet, a flood that began with a trickle following his retirement from performing in 2018. Some of the works released featured other ensembles; the last album released before Shorter’s death featured him in a new quartet with Esperanza Spalding, Teri Lyne Carrington, and Leo Genovese, from a festival appearance the summer before his retirement, and other ambitious recordings combined the “Footprints Quartet” with an orchestra (we’ll review the most notable of those another day).

But today’s record, the evocatively titled Celebration Vol. 1, is a pure representation of the Footprints Quartet at the height of its powers. A live-in-concert recording from an October 18, 2014 appearance at the Stockholm Jazz Festival, it features only a few recognizable Shorter compositions alongside many collective group improvisations. At one point, Shorter thought to title the record Unidentified Flying Objects, after these improvisations, and they do feel a little like invaders from outer space in the way they arrive and transform.

“Zero Gravity To the 15th Dimension” opens as a mysterious minor-third centered tune by Pérez and Patitucci, with rolling thunder under provided by Blade. Starting out on single notes, Shorter builds to an obbligato of mysterious tones that transform into a sort of sonata, with all three melodic players essaying the melody over Blade’s cymbals. A single beat on the bass drum signals the start of a 4/4 section and the return of the chromatic tune from the beginning. The band returns to a more melodic land built approximately around the chords from “Orbits” for a few bars, then turns to a new mysterious modal tune driven by a rising pattern in Patitucci’s bass; they gradually build in energy and dynamic before settling into a tune atop his constantly moving, restless arpeggios. (Hearing him after last week’s first outing of the “Footprints” quartet, it becomes clear just how much the bassist was contributing melodically and improvisationally by this point to the quartet.)

The band draws this number to a close and launches without a pause into “Smilin’ Through,” notionally a cover of the 1919 song by Arthur Penn but thoroughly transformed by Shorter’s arrangement and his playing, which channels some of John Coltrane’s melodic imagination in a far gentler expression. Pérez plays the melody as a gentle modal exploration while Shorter plays obbligatos over and around the tune and Patitucci and Blade create a sternly rhythmic pulse.

Side 2 opens with a series of brief explorations, played without interruption but labeled on the cover as “Zero Gravity to the 11th Dimension,” “Zero Gravity to the 12th Dimension,” and “Zero Gravity – Unbound.” The first opens as though it will be a pop song before turning into a fluttery exploration of beyond. The second begins with a bass figure that is then punctuated by stabs of chords in the piano, and isolated notes from the saxophone. All the players coalesce into an oddly sprightly tune that transforms into the “Unbound” version—a freer playing of the tune in the same key that circles around an oddly familiar set of chords.

A quick whistle signals the opening of “Orbits,” which reveals itself to have been the source of the familiar chords. The melody circles in the piano and the saxophone, and then the players take a step sideways and find themselves in a different tonality, even as Patitucci intones the theme again. They play the theme out and into a different feeling once again, as if they opened the door to a Latin ballroom. This may be the definitive version of “Orbits” by virtue of the way it jumps from planet to planet, each time with the swirling theme signaling the transition. The piece ends with a stuttering version of the theme, accompanied by descending whistling, as the band comes back to earth.

“Edge of the World (End Title)” is a Shorter arrangement of the end theme of the 1980s movie Wargames, written by film composer Arthur Rubinstein. (Yes, really. Shorter was a notorious science fiction buff, and was watching hours of old movies in his Los Angeles home between tours at the end of his life.) Here it’s a solemn and straight reading of the tune to close out the most exploratory, gnomic and fascinating side of the album.

“Zero Gravity to the 90th Dimension” opens with a thudding percussive roll on muffled drums, followed by stabbing chords and a sustained trill from the piano and a bowed eerie note from the bass. Shorter transitions the band out of the Zero Gravity moment with a completely unaccompanied melody, signaling the opening of “Lotus,” a Wayne Shorter original that only appeared on one other album, his 2018 magnum opus Emanon. Here it reveals itself as a tender melody that plays suspended over the chords that were in the 90th dimension previously. At one point the band quotes something that sounds for all the world like Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place,” and it seems as though it fits right in, as does a fleeting quotation by Shorter of “Tomorrow” from Annie. The band reaches a climactic shout that draws to a close with Pérez’ piano.

The final side of the record is a twenty-minute-long performance of the folk song “She Moves Through the Fair.” This folk song, popularized by Fairport Convention among others, became a signature tune for the Footprints Quartet on Shorter’s 2003 album Alegría and he would revisit it on Emanon. The Fairport Convention version feels like the point of departure for the slightly Middle Eastern influenced introduction from the rhythm section; it’s not until almost five minutes in that Shorter joins to play the melody over the unfolding exploration. The band shifts gears about halfway through into a different mood, seeming to play a suite within the performance. Something that this last song brings home more than anything is the quartet’s unique ability to improvise collectively—not in a free jazz sense, but with all four players finding a collective, coherent melodic sense at each moment, so that in a split second they could switch from tender and delicate to pounding to melancholic to triumphant. Shorter, who was always more deeply thoughtful about his compositions than he let on, may in fact have composed some of the transitions, but they seem so effortless that overall they feel like dancing en pointe on a tightrope.

Celebration Volume 1 is the end of this second run of reviews exploring the works of Miles Davis’ band, both during their association with the great trumpeter and afterwards. But just as this record signaled a new effort to bring Shorter’s works before the public, the Miles series will be back as I find more to explore… and add it to my collection. (Hey, I do it so you don’t have to find the shelf space for all of these records!)

We’ll take a break for the annual Christmas records series next week as we head into the holidays, and then turn our attention to something completely different, sort of, in the new year.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Wayne Shorter, Footprints Live!

Album of the Week, November 23, 2024

As we discussed last time, Herbie Hancock went through a transition back to acoustic jazz following the success of his “Rockit” band, and with a few exceptions stayed in this lane. His former Miles Davis (and VSOP) bandmate Wayne Shorter was in a different place. Following his departure from the Miles band after Bitches Brew, Wayne cofounded one of the bedrock-foundation fusion bands, Weather Report (we listened to their first album back in 2022). He stayed with Weather Report and had a fascinating side career as a sideman to Joni Mitchell (with whom he recorded 10 albums) and others (that’s him on Steely Dan’s “Aja” and Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence”). And he continued to record as a leader.

In retrospect, his albums and original compositions in the 1970s and 1980s had some common characteristics, though they were all very different on the surface: strong, if quirky, melodies, combined with rich orchestration—though sometimes the “orchestra” was a bunch of synthesizers. There were high points, like his duo album 1+1 with Herbie Hancock, but there were also some puzzles, like Phantom Navigator, recorded primarily with synthesizers the year after Weather Report’s dissolution and received poorly by critics. But underneath the puzzling production choices were still some of the Shorter trademarks, including new compositions based around the familiar themes of exploration to the edge of space and beyond.

So in the early 2000s when he started touring with the Wayne Shorter Quartet—the first time in his over forty-year career that he had a steady ensemble named after himself!—people started taking notice. And the quartet, also known as the “Footprints Quartet” following this first appearance in a set of live recordings released in 2002, was worth listening to. We’ve met Danilo Pérez as the bandleader on Kurt Elling’s Secrets are the Best Stories; here the pianist was in the full flower of his career, having joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory and in demand both as a performer and a composer. Bassist John Patitucci had played extensively with Chick Corea in both acoustic and electric settings, as well as with Herbie Hancock. And drummer Brian Blade was in demand as a sideman for artists as various as Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, and Emmylou Harris; immediately prior to joining the group he appeared on Norah Jones’ debut Come Away With Me. The group joined Shorter on a series of European jazz festival performances (Festival de Jazz de Vitoria-Gasteiz, Jardins Palais Longchamps in Marseille, Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia) that took a spin through Shorter’s entire career. But this wasn’t a conservatory act; it was an act of revolution.

“Sanctuary,” a track from Bitches Brew, begins with a haze of cymbals and a figure in the bass, then a repeated figure in the high octaves of the piano and an almost imperceptible low note on the tenor saxophone. Shorter rises in prominence in the track, playing a series of diminished minor arpeggios, and Pérez immediately responds with a stronger attack; throughout the players sense each others’ energy and support or even egg it on. Shorter plays the melody as a quiet improvisation in a series of two- and three-note patterns, over a constantly shifting chordal landscape in the piano and locked-in drums and bass from Blade and Patitucci.

The song doesn’t end so much as abruptly crash into “Masqualero,” which is signaled by the descending figure of the theme. The arrangement at first appears to be chaos, with the different players all going in slightly different directions from the opening. However, within a minute both Shorter and Pérez have locked into a slightly Latin rhythm, punctuated by recaps of the theme that you gradually come to realize are the organizing factor, separated by stretches of solos. … Well, the recaps of the theme and a gradually rising tide of intensity, led by Pérez’s piano. And then at about the halfway point, the band seizes onto a new melody, one that surges back and forth (and is a little reminiscent of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way”) before soaring into the stratosphere with Shorter’s soprano sax, at last taking flight. The rhythm section finally settles into a massive groove, one player shouting to another over the rolling thunder of Blade’s drums until they reach a final recapitulation of the theme.

“Valse Triste,” an arrangement of a Sibelius tune that Shorter first played on his 1965 recording The Soothsayer, is a genially shambling waltz tune in which the band pulls out some brilliant bits—imitative piano that follows Shorter’s cascading notes, drum work that seems to blend New Orleans drum tones and silvery cymbals in equal proportion, and a rock solid anchoring bass that underpins while moving the arrangement forward. By the time you notice all the parts working in concert you realize that they’ve left Sibelius far behind, just in time to find him again. When Shorter returns, it’s with a feathery, searching solo that seems to dart above the waves as they crash on the shore, and then soar out to sea.

“Valse Triste” segues seamlessly into “Go” via an introduction on the piano. We’ve met a version of this Schizophrenia-era tune before, as the melody to Kurt Elling’s “Stays”—one wonders if Danilo Pérez brought him the tune. Here the quartet delicately supports Shorter as he essays the melody across multiple verses, with Pérez exchanging harmonic ideas with Shorter, Patitucci both anchoring the tonality and arpeggiating around the corner to see what comes next, and Blade staying in the background, providing only touches of emphasis and ultimately stepping back to let the rest of the ensemble wind up the tune into silence.

The band propels “Aung San Suu Kyi” with a brisk syncopation, approximately 50% faster than Shorter’s rendition of the tune on 1+1. Patitucci’s bass is especially powerful here in a subtle but funky line that hints of a power beneath the simple melody. Pérez takes an angular solo in which Shorter makes gnomic observations, at one point triggering a burst of laughter from the rest of the band. Shorter finds a secondary melody that seems the inverse of the main theme as the rest of the band locks into another one of the massive grooves like the one they found on “Masqualero,” before the final recap.

Shorter then rips off the theme of “Footprints” at approximately the Miles Davis Quintet’s tempo as the forward motion leaps from Pérez to Patitucci to Blade. As each one pauses for breath the next member of the quartet pushes the theme forward. Shorter seems to comment cryptically on the tune with gnomic asides, even essaying a snippet of “Rockabye Baby,” before settling on a motif that feels like a major-key extension of the last four bars of the original theme. Again the band swarms on the newly improvised moment as Shorter dives and pulls up one melodic idea after another. The ideas end in a strangely tender place as Shorter’s saxophone tails off on a high note with Pérez supporting him.

“Atlantis” makes an appearance from Shorter’s 1985 album of the same name. It’s played here as a ballad with a Latin tinge and a muscular bass line. The band reaches an early summit collectively about three minutes in, but Shorter keeps exploring, and ultimately lands on a tune that climbs and circles, ultimately landing on the supertonic, where the piece ends with Pérez striking the strings of the piano. The work flows directly into “JuJu,” where Patitucci plays an arco melody over whistling by one of the band members. Blade plays a heavy funk beat as the players shout to each other and we realize that we’ve been in three all along, as Shorter limns the melody. He steps back as Patitucci and Pérez exchange snippets of the melody, ultimately finding a still quiet rendition of it. When Shorter re-enters, he freely improvises a melody both delicate and fierce before returning to the theme, which climbs up octaves before he locks back into a groove with the band, returning once more to the theme with a climactic outpouring of energy before Pérez winds things down to a finish.

By returning to the quartet format, Shorter found an ideal group to carry forward both his compositional ideas and his improvisational explorations. He would continue in this format, and with this group, almost to the end of his life, with varying emphasis on absolute freedom and composed exploration. We’ll hear another step on this journey next week when we bring this series to a close, for now.

You can hear this week’s album here:

Herbie Hancock, Mega-Mix/TFS

Album of the Week, November 16, 2024

I’ve hinted at it, I’ve teased it, I’ve done all but say it outright. Finally today we take a left turn out of jazz and into early hip-hop, following the steps of Herbie Hancock.

When not cutting traditional jazz albums like Herbie Hancock Quartet, Herbie had been making fusion records since at least 1972’s Head Hunters (a giant album that will melt your head if you aren’t prepared). But his taste radar seemed to go astray as he went further afield from funk into commercial R&B. Some of the late 1970s albums in between the VSOP dates are … well, calling them an acquired taste is probably accurate. They didn’t perform especially well commercially and were savaged by critics.

In the early 1980s he began to make changes, leaving longtime producer David Rubinson to cut Lite Me Up with Quincy Jones (RIP), which had a strong disco influence but didn’t move buyers (or critics). But other winds were blowing, and the duo of bassist Bill Laswell and keyboardist/producer Michael Beinhorn, collectively known as the band Material, approached Herbie to collaborate on material that left more traditional fusion behind for a postmodern, hip-hop sound. The result was the album Future Shock, which both went platinum and earned critical acclaim.

The standout track on the album, the one I remember being played on my school bus, at the bus stop, in the streets, really everywhere I went, was “Rockit.” As part of the work on the album the track was remixed by Grand Mixer DXT, together with other songs from the album (“Autodrive,” “Future Shock,” “TFS,” and “Rough”) and an updated version of the lead song from Head Hunters, “Chameleon.”

The resulting track, “Mega-mix,” was one of the first such remixes, a genre that built a medley out of whole sections of songs, often played over a single beat and joined together with scratching or other DJ techniques. As such, Grand Mixer DXT was a natural artist to innovate in this style, as he is credited as the first turntablist. The mix was issued as both a 7 inch single and a 12 inch extended play; I’m reviewing the single today.

“Mega-Mix” opens with an echoing clatter of percussion over which the beat from “Rockit” plays, interspersed with a man”s voice saying “Herbie… Herbie… Herbie” and the bass line to “Chameleon.” As the track carries on DXT intersperses samples of spoken word and synthesized percussion across the different segments of the track. It’s disorienting and danceable. It sounds like the future. But it also sounds like riding the bus in fifth grade and listening to this tune, and other pieces of electro-funk, coming in over slightly static-y airwaves. There’s very little direct performance by Herbie on it, save for the prominent synth line that is the main melody of “Rockit”—as well as the bass line from “Chameleon,” which he played on the ARP Odyssey.

“TFS” is less influenced by DXT, but that’s not to say it resembles a traditional Herbie Hancock track. The dominant voice here is producer and bassist Bill Laswell. Laswell got his start playing in funk bands in Michigan before moving to New York City in the early 1970s, where he started the long-running project Material with Beinhorn and drummer Fred Maher. The track he wrote for “TFS” is nervous and twitchy, with a squelchy bass line and gated percussion underlying Herbie’s melody piano and synth lines.

Herbie did three albums with the “Rockit” crew, but remained artistically restless, also recording collaborations with kora player Foday Musa Suso (who appeared on the second album, Sound System). In the early 1990s he made a definitive return to acoustic jazz on A Tribute to Miles, a sort of reunion of the V.S.O.P. band with Wallace Roney filling in for Freddie Hubbard, who had injured his lip. Aside from concert performances and one last Bill Laswell collaboration, he’s stayed in the acoustic vein since. A frequent collaborator on those records, especially 1+1 and River: The Joni Letters, was his fellow Miles Davis band mate Wayne Shorter. We’ll hear from Wayne next time.

You can listen to today’s music here:

Bonus: Here’s the song “Rockit” in full, with its slightly insane music video: