Tag: Darryljones

Sting, The Dream of the Blue Turtles

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.

Kenny Kirkland (left) and Omar Hakim.

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.

Darryl Jones (top right) and Branford Marsalis

“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.)

Miles Davis, You’re Under Arrest

Album of the Week, March 15, 2025

We’ve heard Decoy, Miles’ 1984 attempt to equal Herbie Hancock at jazz-funk, and we’ve heard the alternate vision of jazz presented by Wynton Marsalis. But Miles was continuing to evolve his sound, even at this point in his career. The result was You’re Under Arrest, an album featuring original music and pop covers. It drove the Marsalis camp crazy.

I know this because when I saw Stanley Crouch (the critic who wrote the liner notes for Wynton’s albums) speak at the University of Virginia in 1991, following Miles’ death, he still insisted that Miles’ material from In a Silent Way on was garbage, saving special venom for You’re Under Arrest and its pop leanings.1 He spoke with horror of the cover, which showed Miles in a leather suit and hat, holding a Tommy gun. That there was role play here—Miles playing the part of the gangster, the well-off scofflaw—appears to have gone over Crouch’s head.

And yes, in some ways You’re Under Arrest is all about role play—the opening and closing tracks are scenes with dialog (and special guests). But there’s also role play of a different kind here. Miles still had plenty of funk in him, but he also appears to have been alert to what was going on in pop music, where a new embrace of melody was fueling the rise of a New Wave of musicians. Miles and his band, which for this outing included Darryl Jones on bass, Al Foster on drums, Robert Irving on synths, Bob Berg on tenor and soprano saxophone, and both John Schofield and—for the first time since the early 1970s—John McLaughlin on guitar, shifted direction and, improbably found their way inside that pop sound.

That’s not to say that the funk was gone. “One Phone Call/Street Scenes,” featuring dialog between a police officer who’s pulled Miles over in his Ferrari and Miles insouciantly responding, “Arrest some of this!” (with both voices done by Miles), features an incessant bass, drums and synth riff over which John Scofield wails and Miles plays a tight riff in the higher end of his range. At the end, another conversation, this time between a Spanish speaker, a Polish speaker, and a French policeman (played, improbably, by Sting), who issues a translation of the Miranda warning.

The second track is done with playing around, but it’s not heavy—in fact, it’s “Human Nature.” The track, written by Steve Porcaro of Toto, had caught the ear of Michael Jackson while Porcaro was assisting with the production of Jackson’s monster album Thriller. Jackson had John Bettis, a lyricist who had collaborated with the Carpenters (“Top of the World”), the Pointer Sisters (“Slow Hand”), Barbara Mandrell (“One of a Kind Pair of Fools”), and others,2 rewrite the lyrics. It became a top 10 hit, which is presumably why Miles had heard it. But listening to him play the melody, it’s clear that he found something deep in it. His clear trumpet plays it straight, as a ballad, giving the same sort of space to the track that he once found in “My Funny Valentine.” And his technique is at a much higher level than it was on Decoy, where he seemed to still be suffering from health challenges. Here the trumpet is front and center; indeed, if there’s anything to criticize about the track, it’s that the rest of the band is basically used only to provide a pop background. There’s very little of interest in the arrangement from a jazz perspective, but it’s very pleasant as pop music.

“Intro: MD1 / Something On Your Mind / MD2” takes us back into the funk, but thankfully gives the band way more to do. Scofield gets a few fierce solos, and the band’s pulse is tight beneath both him and Miles. The trumpeter’s solo splits the difference between the pure funk of “One Phone Call” and the pop melodicism of “Human Nature.” The track ends in a swirl of synthesizers and a hint of a march rhythm.

Miles’s trumpet introduces “Ms. Morrissine,” a relentlessly funky pop track that features washes of distinctively mid-1980s synthesizer sound (there’s a certain watery quality to some of the sounds, including the drums, that couldn’t come from any other time) beneath Miles’ lyrical playing. John McLaughlin, who hadn’t played with Miles since 1972’s On the Corner, adds hints of rhythm and brief guitar lines that twine around the edges of the band, but gets a proper solo at the end. A McLaughlin overdub introduces the tag, a brief excerpt from “Katia: Prelude” that fades out the first half.

“Katia” fades in to start the second half of the album, with McLaughlin stating the first melody and taking a lead role for the first two minutes. Miles’ improvisations here are less melodic, more funky, and the track feels more alive and less programmed; even where Irving’s keyboards take over, McLaughlin torches the edges of the track and takes over again. He and Miles trade leads throughout the second half of the song. It’s a workout but a fun listen.

“Time After Time,” written by Cyndi Lauper with Rob Hyman of the melodica-heavy band The Hooters, returns to the format of “Human Nature.” To my ears the effort here is less successful. Miles’ playing is solid but mixed lower relative to the backing track, and he finds less swing in his melody. There are hints of interest in some of Scofield’s contributions, but the synths ultimately swamp this one for me. Miles would revisit the track live throughout the rest of his life with more satisfactory results; I especially like the version from the 1991 Vienne Jazz Festival, recorded a few months before his death; Miles was playing a lot less, but the arrangement was sparser and gave each musical utterance room to shine.

“You’re Under Arrest,” credited to Scofield, returns to the jazz-funk well once more for a thorny blues. After the guitarist introduces the number, Miles unleashes a blistering set of runs, trading off with Scofield as he did with McLaughlin on “Katia.” The melody is recapitulated by Irving, then Bob Berg takes a brief solo on tenor sax before Scofield rips through a set of fiery improvisations. Throughout Jones plays fluidly beneath the brisk keyboard runs, providing an elastic low-end.

“Medley: Jean-Pierre/You’re Under Arrest/Then There Were None” closes as the album opens, with a conceptual piece. A wistful ballad is slowly covered by the sounds of catastrophe: a crying child, wailing women, the sound of a massive explosion, and a tolling church bell. It’s an unexpectedly somber end, left unexplained in the liner notes.

But the likely answer is that the track marked an ending; specifically, to Miles’ thirty-year-long association with Columbia Records. While on tour in early 1985, after recording You’re Under Arrest but before its release, he signed a contract with Warner Brothers, and recorded the rest of his career on the label. He moved on to new collaborators, with bassist Marcus Miller playing the arranger role that had been Irving’s for the first half of the 1980s. Other members of the band scattered, but several of them went on to non-traditional roles on the other side of the jazz/pop fence. We’ll hear about that in a few weeks. Next week, though, we’ll give a listen to another outing from the Marsalis brothers, this one considerably more successful than Hot House Flowers.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Miles was listening to a lot of pop music in the mid-1980s, and recording arrangements of it. Not all the covers from this session made it onto the album, though. Here’s his cover of Tina Turner’s comeback single, released for the first time in 2022 on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: That’s What Happened:

BONUS BONUS: Miles’ way with pop songs and his insistence in updating the American Songbook with more modern material influenced many later jazz musicians. One direct influence is the adoption by other jazz musicians of the material he covered in his 1980s albums. Eva Cassidy covered “Time After Time” on the posthumous album of the same name in 2000, and pianist and composer Vijay Iyer covered “Human Nature” on two separate albums, 2010’s Solo and 2012’s trio recording Accelerando. Here’s a live version with the trio:

  1. This lecture was my first attempt to ask tough questions of a speaker with whom I disagreed. I asked Crouch, regarding his words on Miles, how he felt about Branford Marsalis’s work with Sting, given that Marsalis had previously played more “straight” jazz with his brother. I recall Crouch gave a non-answer, which I suppose was inevitable. ↩︎
  2. Among other later collaborators, Bettis would work with Madonna on “Crazy for You,” Peabo Bryson on “Can You Stop the Rain,” and New Kids on the Block on “If You Go Away.” That’s what you call range. ↩︎

Miles Davis, Decoy

Album of the Week, March 1, 2025

It was bound to happen. After two months of pop music we’re right back with Miles. That’s no accident; as Sting left the Police behind for a solo career, he sought out jazz musicians, and found several of them in Miles’ band.

The last Miles album, in his recording chronology, that we wrote about was Champions, recorded in 1971. Miles’ fusion years were musically exploratory and often fruitful—a listen to “He Loved Him Madly,” Miles’ tribute to Duke Ellington from the compilation Get Up With It, puts the lie to any assertion that Miles was slacking as a composer during this time. But by the same token, his worsening physical health was leaving him in constant pain, and his various addictions were taking a toll on his emotional state. Following appearances at the 1975 Newport Jazz Festival and the Schaefer Music Festival in New York, he dropped out of music.

He spent the next few years wallowing in sex and drugs, but also in finally getting a long postponed and much needed hip replacement. After a failed attempt to form a band with guitarist Larry Coryell, keyboardists Masabumi Kikuchi and George Pavilis, bassist T.M. Stevens and drummer Al Foster, he withdrew again. Finally getting back into the studio in 1980 and 1981, he released his first new album in six years, The Man with the Horn. Touring with a new group consisting of Foster, saxophonist Bill Evans (no relation), bassist Marcus Miller, and guitarist John Scofield, he recorded a few albums but suffered a relapse with alcohol that led to his having a stroke. His then-wife Cicely Tyson helped him recover and also helped him finally give up drugs and alcohol.

He also heard what his erstwhile collaborator Herbie Hancock had been doing in the studio. Realizing that Herbie had achieved mass success and a new audience by combining jazz and hip-hop on “Rockit,” Miles set out to do the same thing on his new album Decoy, adding more synthesizers and more prominent bass, this time played by Darryl Jones, who went by the nickname “Munch.” The band was also joined by saxophonist Branford Marsalis, Wynton’s older brother; the brothers had played together in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Branford was playing in Wynton’s quintet; he recorded his debut record Scenes in the City the same year that he joined Miles in the studio.

That said, it’s a synth bassline that greets us first on “Decoy,” played by Robert Irving III, who wrote this track. There’s not much tune here, but there’s a lot of funk. When Jones’ bass comes in, it anchors and propels the track along with Foster’s insistent drumming. Miles’ trumpet is in fine form, but he spends the track interjecting two bar riffs. About halfway through, Branford Marsalis takes a solo turn on soprano saxophone. Breaking free of the robotic rhythm, he seems to fly above the dense robot-funk texture. Scofield is just another part of that texture on this track until his solo, where he raises the interest as well, but ultimately the constrained modal scale doesn’t provide enough of a melody to make the whole thing work.

Miles seems determined to keep us in robot-funk land, with the appropriately named “Robot 415,” this one a scrap of a tune that nevertheless gets him a co-writing credit along with Irving. Here he gives us another not-quite melody over the difficult meter, one that comes and goes in less than a minute.

“Code M.D.,” while still on the robotic side, has a little more of a blues melody across the two-chord vamp. It helps that Scofield is let loose much earlier on the track; his first solo enlivens the song, lifting it from something that feels like mostly backing track to a blues inflected raga. When he steps back and it’s just the horns in the pocket on the track, it feels like a holding pattern. Branford’s solo doesn’t soar quite as much here; he’s only given about sixteen bars. But we finally hear Miles take a solo, and he essays up into the upper end of the horn range, tailing off into a wistful melody at the end, and playing a modal scale against the funk. He sounds properly enlivened, in fact, right up until the track’s fade-out.

“Freaky Deaky” is credited solely to Miles, and he’s at the synthesizer over Foster and Jones, as well as playing a trumpet run through an effects pedal joining to add a little textural interest. It’s a noodle, nothing more, a sort of aimless jam, but the melody played by the trumpet is at least ear-grabbing while it’s there. I don’t know why they put it on the record, to be honest, especially after hearing the recording session version on the Miles Davis Bootleg releases, a burning blues jam in two parts.

“What It Is” shifts us into a very different gear to open Side 2, which is entirely co-written by Miles and Scofield. Recorded live at the Montréal Jazz Festival in 1983, the energy level is off the chart, and if Irving seems to be leaning against the keyboard on his cluster chords, at least there’s plenty going on in that acrobatic electric bass part, providing a proper hook. It’s saxophonist Bill Evans (no relation) here rather than Marsalis, and he plays with more abandon and less piercing fire. Miles makes the interesting choice to overdub an additional trumpet line over his solo, setting up an almost-conversation. It thickens the texture and somehow strips back a little of the urgency from his actual solo. It stops abruptly.

“That’s Right” gives us the slow-jam version of the music that Irving has been providing throughout the whole album, with a slow but funky pulse in the bass and a drum hit that mostly stays out of the way. It’s all the better to let Miles rip out a melodic line that pushes against the weird tension between the bass line, which mostly hugs the dominant (the fifth) of the scale so that the rest of the players can shift between major and minor at will, and the synths, which hover on every other degree of the scale. Scofield’s guitar is a force of nature here, beginning the solo with a bluesy skronch but quickly shifting to a more virtuosic expression and then back again. When Branford comes in, he hews more toward the virtuosic, with an occasional blues lick near the top of the range to establish continuity with Scofield’s concept. What’s interesting is that, even in this context, Branford swings, playing against the rhythm in a way that the other players don’t. It’s an interesting collision of swing and funk, which insists on a strong rhythmic pulse on the One. When Miles comes in, it’s an echo of the soaring melodies that he would have played ten years prior on tunes like “Honky Tonk.” But there he was playing against a firm rhythmic footing and a halo of odd electric textures that translated to something that was 100% blues; here the timbre of the keyboards seems to sap some of that rhythmic energy at the end.

That’s okay, because “That’s What Happened” has energy in spades. Another live track from Montréal, this seems to pick up where “What It Is” left off, acting like a coda to the earlier track, and very much in the same spirit. It closes out the album with a funky flourish.

Miles may have set out to record “Rockit,” but that definitely didn’t happen; between Scofield’s virtuosity, Branford’s imagination, and the odd harmonic statements of Irving, this band was still firmly in a jazz space. But this material did keep him exploring the boundary between jazz and more popular forms of music—something he leaned into even further on his next release. Before we go there, we’re going to hear how other voices—and coincidentally another Marsalis—tried to pull the form back to something closer (perhaps) to its roots.

You can listen to this week’s album here: