Album of the Week, March 29, 2025
The pop star was coming full circle, back to jazz. Having started his career playing in fusion combos around Newcastle, Sting had spent from 1977 to 1983 perfecting a blend of punk, reggae and New Wave that eventually became a distinctive pop sound that gathered imitators around the world. (See: Men at Work, the Outfield, the 77s, the Tenants, even early Wang Chung.) But at the same time the band was climbing up the charts, Sting was changing his musical approach. Over the course of the four albums we have listened to so far, the reggae influence fell away, as did the “live in the studio” aspect of their presentation and some (but not all) of Sting’s trademark vocal affectations. (For a funny and devastatingly well observed take on Sting’s vocal sound from the Police years, one need only turn to “Weird” Al Yankovic.)
Still, I remember being somewhat astonished, even at the age of 12, when I heard the lead single from his solo debut, The Dream of the Blue Turtles. The soundscapes were wider and there was an unmistakably different musical approach. And what was that horn? (At that point I hadn’t listened to any jazz and couldn’t tell a saxophone from a trumpet.) I consumed the breathless article that Newsweek ran about him—actually clipped and saved it, and re-read it so many times that to find it I knew I could google “sting in short you’d reinvent yourself” and it would turn up. Even without my pre-teen naïveté, the pivot Sting pulled off is pretty impressive. He managed to pull players from three of the biggest names in jazz—Miles Davis, Weather Report, and Wynton Marsalis—to join his band and record his album.
We’ve met bass player Darryl Jones, who anchored the bottom end of Miles’ group on Decoy and You’re Under Arrest. We haven’t met Omar Hakim, who joined Weather Report in 1982 and was also in demand as a session artist, playing on David Bowie’s Let’s Dance and Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms; he would later work with Madonna and appear on Miles’ first album for Warner Bros., Tutu. Backing vocalists Dollette McDonald and Janice Pendarvis were both similarly in high demand, having separately worked with Blondie and Talking Heads, and together with Laurie Anderson (Mister Heartbreak). And Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland, of course, had been playing as part of Wynton’s group for a while, including on both Hot House Flowers and Black Codes (From the Underground). Together this group of roughhousing American jazz musicians was a big shift in Sting’s musical world, and you can hear traces of it in the songs on the first album—though, true to Sting form, most of them still are based in the synth-and-drum-machine demos that he recorded by himself.
“If You Love Somebody Set Them Free” gives a good taste of how Sting’s songwriting and performance were transformed by working with the new musicians. Opening with a three-part multitracked vocal refrain on “Free, free, set them free” with Sting vocalizing over top, the band enters, led by Kenny Kirkland on what sounds like a Wurlitzer (but which might just have been the Synclavier). Sting’s vocals are fluid and improvisatory as he sings about approaching love without possessiveness: “If you wanna keep something precious/Gotta lock it up and throw away the key/[But] If you wanna hold on to your possession/Don’t even think about me.” Branford enters, playing a countermelody to the chorus, sung by Sting with backing vocals from McDonald and Pendarvis. There’s a lot going on, musically, at the chorus; Sting’s melody line goes from the leading tone up to the octave and descends in a bluesy minor, while Darryl Jones lays down a solid bass line on the tonic and submediant, Kirkland finds corners to embellish, and Branford continually trades melodic lines with Sting. All throughout is the steady heartbeat of Omar Hakim’s drums. When we get to the bridge we’re suddenly in F major for about 16 beats, with Darryl Jones doing a little funky slap bass around the edges and McDonald and Pendarvis adding a groovy “doo doo doo” countermelody. The whole thing comes across as a slice of a particularly fudgy chocolate cake after the austerity of the ending of Synchronicity.
The feeling of abundance is underscored by “Love is the Seventh Wave.” A full-throated embrace of reggae joy, aided by Jones’ rocksteady bass and a chiming Synclavier that resembles steel drums, the lyrics give us a picture of an implacable apocalyptic wave of love coming to sweep away borders and division. Uncredited studio trombonist Frank Opolko gets a few notes at the bridge, providing an almost Dixieland foil to Branford’s saxophone. The whole work stays in a relentlessly sunny G major the whole way through to the coda, when Sting uncorks the sunniest surprise of all: a lighthearted riff on “Every breath you take/every move you make/every cake you bake/every leg you break.” Maybe the King of Pain was ready to get off his throne after all?
Alas, the lightheartedness doesn’t continue into the next track. “Russians” is one of those songs that feels ridiculously naïve today, but as an anxious pre-teen in Ronald Reagan’s America who was having nuclear nightmares after The Day After, I was more than ready to sing along with Sting’s hopeful poem that the Russians and Americans would prove too human to escalate the Cold War into heat. The track steals wholesale from the “Romance” theme of Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kije suite for its wordless chorus, played on the synthesizer; in fact, this is the one track on which the rest of the band does not appear.
“Children’s Crusade” starts with something of the same feeling, but here the synth piano is played by Kenny Kirkland and it’s Omar Hakim providing the delicate cymbal work over Jones’ agile bass line. Sting pulls one of the most elaborate lyrical conceits of his career to this point, comparing the death of thousands of British young men in the First World War to the exploitation of children in the 13th century’s failed crusades to the Holy Land—and then (as if that weren’t enough) to young heroin addicts in the streets of London. Branford enters on the chorus with a mock-heroic fanfare that becomes a threnody. At the extended middle section, the band gets to improvise collectively for the first time, and it’s a burner, with Omar Hakim continually building in intensity over the burning coals of the keys and bass, and Branford playing an extended improvisation that combines long melodic lines and moments of Coltrane-inspired “sheets of sound.” It’s one of the moments that most seems to fulfill the promise of a true unification between jazz and pop.
And speaking of improvisation, there’s “Shadows in the Rain,” which opens with Branford asking with some exasperation, “What key is this in? Wait, wait! What key is it in?” as Omar Hakim plays a huge backbeat under Sting’s lyrics. This is a complete reimagining of the shambling jam tune last heard on Zenyatta Mondatta; it’s now a fluidly nifty piece of jazz rock and another opportunity to hear what this band could do in a more purely jazz setting.
“We Work the Black Seam” is another track that leans heavily on Sting’s programmed backing track, but is given humanity by Branford and Kenny’s sensitive playing. A protest song of a different sort—rather than lamenting the environmental cost of coal mining, here Sting talks about the generations of miners who stand to lose their jobs as the power industry converts to nuclear reactors. It’s not entirely ideologically coherent, but it does stand as one of the more compassionate works on the album. By comparison, “Consider Me Gone” gives us a coolly precise kiss-off to a bad relationship. With an ambling bass line and a cracking snare drum that together recall Rita Moreno’s take on “Fever,” you can almost forget that Sting cribbed three lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 35. There’s just a trace of Branford on this one, in the first chorus, but plenty of Kenny Kirkland, Darryl Jones and Omar Hakim in the final verse and outro.
Sting liked to explain the title of the album as a literal dream, in which these “massive, virile blue turtles” crashed in and wrecked his formal English garden; he took this to be a psychic reference to the effect the American jazz musicians were having on his music and life. “The Dream of the Blue Turtles” is a tight little wordless interlude with the band playing a series of themes—jazzy, rocking, blues improv, then back to the rock and jazz, all in about a minute. It’s fun, and one wonders what might happen if the band were turned loose for more than a minute on the material.
“Moon Over Bourbon Street” opens with Sting playing upright bass and singing from the perspective of a vampire haunted by his condition. Credited in the liner notes to an inspiration from Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, the song builds slowly to an anguished cry of regret: “How could I be this way, when I pray to God above/I must love what I destroy, and destroy the thing I love?” Again, Branford’s playing behind Sting’s voice is the standout contribution to a track that otherwise feels as though it was largely built around programmed keyboards and an uncredited orchestra.
“Fortress Around Your Heart” gives us a cinematic story, again inspired by Sting’s failed marriage, but full of regret over the aftermath of its dissolution. We again get Branford the herald here on the choruses, as with “Children’s Crusade” providing a touch of martial energy while his lines between the verses are longer and more contemplative atop the spare keyboard parts. The track, with a more prominent saxophone presence than the album’s other singles, made an impression on me when Top 40 radio would play it, leaving me speechless both for the brutal honesty of its lyrics (“I was away so long for years and years/You probably thought or even wished that I was dead”) and the relative sophistication of its melodic writing. Branford gets the last word on the outro, fading out as the harmonies ultimately refuse to resolve and wrapping an album full of both emotional highs and deep regrets.
Odd fit with Top 40 or not, the album and its singles performed well. The album ultimately went triple platinum and hit No. 2 on the Billboard Top 200 charts and both “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free” and “Fortress Around Your Heart” reached No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock charts, while “Russians” and “Love is the Seventh Wave” cracked the top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. While not as strong as the chart performance of Synchronicity, it was pretty clear that Sting’s future as a solo artist was assured, and the follow on tour with the full band confirmed it. We’ll check out that tour next time.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: There weren’t many non-album tracks from The Dream of the Blue Turtles, but “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free” did get “Another Day” as a b-side. The track, which features contributions from the entire band, reminds us that it wasn’t just Sting mixing in ideas from jazz; it feels reminiscent of the Pointer Sisters’ great sophisti-pop hit “Automatic” even as it drops another Shakespeare line (“Oh, that this too-solid flesh would melt and resolve into a dew”). (Someday I’ll have to write at more length about sophisti-pop. 1985 was a weird time on the pop charts.)
I love this beyond words.