Tag: Darryljones

Sting, We’ll Be Together

Sting got up to a lot between his first and second album, including reuniting with the Police, saving the world, and … making beer commercials? The #albumoftheweek checks out the road to “We’ll Be Together.”

Album of the Week, April 19, 2025

I’m going to talk about the lead off single from Sting’s second solo studio album in this post, but it’s going to take me a while to get to it, because Sting took almost two and a half years to make the song. And what he was doing in the meantime kept him very busy.

The last we heard from Sting, he had followed his debut solo album with a documentary and live album, covering the formation of the jazz-rock combo that accompanied him through both those projects (and the birth of his son Jake). Those projects took up a good portion of 1985, though the Bring on the Night live album would not see release until the summer of 1986. So what was he doing in the meantime? Well, first of all he had to save the world. He appeared in a series of six concerts for Amnesty International known as the Conspiracy of Hope tour alongside Peter Gabriel, U2, Lou Reed, Joan Baez, Bryan Adams and the Neville Brothers. A number of Very Significant Things happened in these concerts. First, it solidified Sting’s association with Amnesty and his commitment to the cause of prisoners of conscience.

Second, the concerts served as a venue for an unexpected reunion of the Police, who hadn’t played together since their Synchronicity tour ended in March 1984 in Australia. The band wrapped up the Conspiracy of Hope tour by reuniting during the last three concerts; on June 15, 1986, they played a set at Giants Stadium in New Jersey in which they closed their set with “Invisible Sun.” U2’s earnest lead vocalist Bono joined that performance, and at the end, the Police members handed their instruments to the members of U2 as they joined the all-star finale version of “I Shall Be Released.” Bono, naturally regarded it as “a very big moment, like passing a torch.”

Sting and the band weren’t quite prepared to pass the torch, though, and they made arrangements to reconvene in the studio in July to start working on songs for a new album. Fate might have looked very differently if that project had gone ahead as planned, but the night before the recordings Stewart Copeland fell from a horse and broke his collarbone. Without the ability to effectively play together in the studio, the band did not gel as a writing and performing unit and they left after only recording two songs, both re-recordings of hits from Zenyatta Mondatta. “Don’t Stand So Close To Me ’86” would feature on their Every Breath You Take: The Singles compilation (and be played endlessly by me), but “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da ’86” wouldn’t be officially released until 2000.

So much for the Police, alas. So what happened to Sting next? Well, the next thing he released was also associated with Amnesty; the “Conspiracy of Hope” tour begat a compilation record, also called Conspiracy of Hope (at least in the UK; the US version received the less euphonious name Rock for Amnesty). Other participants shared previously recorded album tracks (inevitably and appropriately, Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” from his third self-titled album leads the first side) or studio rarities like the re-recorded version of Tears for Fears’ “I Believe.”

Sting chose to go into the studio to record something specifically for the compilation. That he chose to cover Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” seems a little incomprehensible now, but in the context of Amnesty’s work for justice, a pointed callout to America’s own history of racial injustice can be perhaps forgiven. The performance itself is brief but memorable; Sting’s vocals are in fine fettle and he is accompanied mostly by his own upright bass, with some subtle cymbals and keyboards.

After that, in late 1986, Sting’s mother died. They had not been especially close; in fact, Sting was at this point all but estranged from his family, having made some impolitic remarks in 1980 to a Rolling Stone interviewer: “I come from a family of losers – I’m the eldest of four – and I’ve rejected my family as something I don’t want to be like. My father delivered milk for a living and my mother was a hairdresser. Those are respectable occupations, but my family failed as a family, I grew up with a pretty piss-poor family life. I lived in Newcastle, which would be like living in Pittsburgh, and the whole thing for me was escape.” Though he was penitent in a 1983 interview, the family did not appear to have reconciled before his mother’s death. Years later, he confessed that he threw himself directly into work as a way to cope.

And the work that he found, at least for the time being, was a beer commercial. If you ever thought that “We’ll Be Together” sounded a little slick compared to the rest of Sting’s second album from which it was drawn, that might be because it was literally composed on spec: the Japanese brewing conglomerate Kirin Brewing Company asked him for a song for a commercial, to include the word “together” in the lyrics. Sting apparently wrote the song in a few minutes, the producers liked it, and he went and recorded it with Eric Clapton on guitar. A tidy payday.

Apparently Sting felt some remorse or at least dissatisfaction with the track, because he re-recorded it for its single release and album incarnation, this time with session guitarist Bryan Loren (best known for authoring and performing the song “Do the Bartman” from the album The Simpsons Sing the Blues, with an uncredited Michael Jackson on backing vocals. You can’t make this stuff up). But you can hear the original version with Clapton on the expanded edition of his second album, or on the b-side of the 12″ single. The 12″ also features the original album version, an extended mix that elongates the intro and adds a few extra bars, and an instrumental version.

All the non-Clapton versions feature the same band: Sting on bass and vocals, Kenny Kirkland on keys, Branford Marsalis on saxophone, Dolette McDonald and Janice Pendarvis on backing vocals, and some new faces—French drummer Manu Katché, who had played with Peter Gabriel on So, percussionist Mino Cinelu who had played with Miles and Weather Report, and backing vocalists Renée Geyer and Vesta Williams (who scored six top-10 Billboard R&B hits in the 1980s and 1990s in her own right). Missing from the mix: Omar Hakim, who was busy with other commitments, and Darryl Jones, who had presciently observed in an interview segment in Bring On the Night that “I’m not so totally sure yet that this is a band, in that everyone has… a totally equal say in what happens.” He would not record again with Sting, though he went on to a long career as the bassist in The Rolling Stones.

The other song on the single is a true curiosity in Sting’s work. “Conversation with a Dog” features a tight bass groove, some robotic sequencing and funky keyboards, and some of Sting’s most philosophical lyrics, cast as a Socratic dialog with his dog: “What about our politics, philosophy, our history?/ ‘If something’s admirable in these, it is a mystery.’” It’s a great showcase for Kenny Kirkland, if nothing else, and for Sting’s moderately believable impression of a barking dog. And I must confess I continue to have in the back of my mind the couplet “There must be something in our scientific treasure/ ‘Despair,’ he said, ‘of which your weapons are the measure.’” “Conversation with a Dog” hinted that Sting had deeper preoccupations on his mind than beer commercials, and we’ll check more of those out next time.

You can see the original music video for “We’ll Be Together,” set to the extended mix of the song, here:

Sadly, there was no video for “Conversation with a Dog.” But! It turns out there were several Kirin beer commercials as part of the epic advertising campaign, all featuring Sting looking smoldering. You’re welcome.

PS: I have yet to forgive the graphic designer of this record sleeve for not knowing the difference between a straight quotation mark and a proper apostrophe. I haven’t been able to prove it, but I’ve long suspected that this cover was a contributing factor leading to Robin Williams’ creation of her groundbreaking work The Mac Is Not a Typewriter. Still worth a read, if only to clear up the mystery of the number of spaces after a period (one).

Sting, Bring on the Night

Album of the Week, April 5, 2025

You’re a rock star who’s just changed genres and shifted into a jazz-rock hybrid with a band of up and coming jazz legends who have played with the best. You’ve had a few hits from your first solo album with this group. What do you do next?

Well, if you’re Sting, you start touring the minute the album hits the streets, and you hire a film crew, complete with an award winning director, to document the formation of the band as a touring unit and to capture the band at its inception, rather than waiting until the band is at its peak or dissolving. Then you release that movie while the album is still on the charts, and follow it up the next summer with a live double album release in which the jazz is even more prominent. Welcome to Bring on the Night.

The one thing that struck me forcefully, listening last week in detail to The Dream of the Blue Turtles, was how much of it was clearly directly from Sting’s sequencers, the band (especially Kenny Kirkland’s fine playing) audible mostly as color or commentary. That’s not the case here. This is the sound of a jazz band (again, composed of Kirkland, Branford Marsalis, Darryl Jones, and Omar Hakim, with Janice Pendarvis and Dolette McDonald on backing vocals) taking a concert’s worth of material and making it thoroughly their own.

That said, the opening to “Bring on the Night/When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” is all Sting. With the reggae rhythms of the Police’s version of “Bring on the Night” banished, Sting gives us a brisk, running arpeggio down the song’s key changes on his guitar, accompanied by quiet keyboards and percussion as he sings the opening in an easy voice. When he comes to the chorus, the stacked vocals of Pendarvis and McDonald bring that richness that they added to the chorus of “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free,” with Kenny’s keyboards adding mercurial chord changes around the edges of the tune. The second verse features a Darryl Jones bass line that anchors the tune in even more funk; when the second chorus comes in, Branford Marsalis plays a counter-melody that riffs into a minor key vamp that the band plays for 64 bars, under the chorus of “Bring on the Night” and then wordless vocals—and then Sting sings the opening notes to “When the World is Running Down You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” over the same vamp. After two verses and two choruses, the rest of the band drops back and Kenny Kirkland takes an extended solo that manages to continue the riff, extend the chordal palette, play with rhythm, and build dynamic contrast, all over the course of about 16 choruses in a little over three minutes. (Narrator: “It was about at this time, at the age of fourteen, that I decided I needed to listen to more jazz.”) The band does a little call and response with the chorus, and then: a rap break. Yes, that’s Branford Marsalis shouting out the band with some early 1980s rhymes, in what I believe is the saxophonist’s only rap credit on record. The band continues to jam over the vamp as they return to the verse once more, this time with Branford playing a tenor obbligato over the sung chorus and into an explosive but brief solo over one last chorus.

By contrast to the immense jam of the first track, “Consider Me Gone” hews much closer to the arrangement on the record; what excitement there is comes purely from the interchanges of the musicians, starting with Sting trading phrases with Branford in the opening and Dolette, Janice and Omar Hakim building stacks of harmony over the bluesy “You can’t say that” pre-chorus. Here Kenny’s Synclavier, sounding like a Hammond organ, primarily simmers rather than boiling, and Branford builds intensity by punctuating each line of the verse, sometimes just commenting, other times spinning lines of melody that pull in different directions. Darryl Jones and Omar Hakim anchor the blues, coming to a slow boil finally in the last chorus as the band moves into the closing vamp.

“Low Life,” originally released as the b-side to “Spirits in the Material World” and dating all the way back to 1979, is an odd tune, a lyric that seems to be about the hazards of slumming it: “A fatal fascination for the seedy party of town…” The band gamely gives it a full treatment nonetheless, blooming out of another Sting arpeggiated guitar opening, with Omar Hakim’s muscular drumming bringing up the energy through two verses until Branford’s saxophone enters as if summoned. The ultimate pleasure of the song is again hearing the band sing those crunchy chords over the chorus: “Low life/is no life” is an odd refrain to have stuck in your head, but here we are.

“We Work the Black Seam” again closely follows the studio arrangement, albeit with the synths of the original supplemented by a more prominent solo keyboard part that’s echoed by Branford’s soprano sax. But there’s also a very slight swing to Sting’s vocal and the instrumentalists’ accompaniment that brings some relief from the insistent repetition of the programmed keyboard track, and Branford’s free saxophone lines over the second verse again pull at the tonality of the verse, bringing it to unexpectedly rich places. The extra half-verse that is added in the third feels actually moving, despite being a bit of a word salad: “Our conscious lives run deep/You cling onto your mountain while we sleep/This way of life is part of me/There is no price so only let me be.”

“Driven to Tears” takes the intensity of the Police’s statement of empathy for the impoverished world around them and stretches it into a seven-minute-long workout. It’s an engaging listen, but proves the rare case where this band couldn’t elevate the source material above its existing heights. That’s not for lack of trying; there are some intense moments in the arrangement, and the crowd energy is high as they clap along with the band on the opening vamp. Again, Kenny Kirkland is the hero of the arrangement, playing mostly acoustic piano and opening holes of light in the harmonics of the vamp. Branford enters in the second chorus and takes an extended solo as the chords change from the dark tonality of the opening to a higher key and Branford repeats a blues riff, hopping up to a blue note on the minor third. The band comes back to the original tonality for the last verse and seems to come to a conclusion, but then starts to build up again and drops right back into the higher key. This is where the arrangement falls flat for me, as Branford continues soloing even though he doesn’t bring forward any new ideas. Ultimately when the band brings it back to one last chorus it comes as a little bit of a relief.

“The Dream of the Blue Turtles/Demolition Man,” on the other hand, gives us a brisk romp through the Blue Turtles instrumental theme, complete with a quick dip into three in the verse and a brief Kenny Kirkland solo. The band then drops into a driving rock beat and gives us a fierce rave-up on the Police song, with some improvised clavier soloing from Kirkland and apocalyptic drumming from Omar Hakim. Where “Driven to Tears” feels stretched thin, “Demolition Man” feels muscular and energetic, as though it could go on for hours. Maybe it’s that riff; maybe it’s Janice and Dolette singing the hell out of that chorus. Maybe it’s even having Branford play a real saxophone part on the hook instead of Sting’s enthusiastic amateur work. Whatever, it is, as they say, a banger.

When I first heard the album, “One World (Not Three)/Love is the Seventh Wave” opened the second CD; on the vinyl version it opens the second record with an a cappella version of the repeated vocal hook to the Police’s song (“It may seem a million miles away/But it gets a little closer every day”), here given a reading that puts reggae energy back into the song thanks to the steel-drum-like Synclavier work of Kenny Kirkland and Omar Hakim’s percussion. Sting leads the arena in a singalong of the chorus, brings back an a cappella rendition of the vocal hook, then returns to the chorus with some vocal improvisation atop it, only to slam right into “Love is the Seventh Wave,” with Kirkland, Darryl Jones and Omar Hakim continuing to play the same arrangement across the new song’s chord changes. Branford takes another solo, sort of; his approach to these songs appears to mostly be to repeat one idea across eight bars, then switch to another idea and do it again, as though making sure the folks in the cheap seats get the picture. There’s some decent harmonic imagination going on, but not enough of it. The band settles into a new key for a sort of New Wave blues vamp, and Sting and the vocalists alternate singing “One world is enough” with the lyrics to “Love is the Seventh Wave” in the new minor key. The arrangement winds up back in the original key in a sort of summation, but due to the drop in energy during the blues vamp it feels more like the band climbs to its feet than a culmination in energy.

“Moon Over Bourbon Street” again aligns closely to its arrangement on the record, which isn’t a bad thing, since the original was a standout on Dream of the Blue Turtles. Again, we get Sting on upright bass and Branford on soprano sax, though in this arrangement without the full orchestra Branford and Kenny have to fill in, ably, for the classical interlude; we even get what sounds like a little timpani roll from Omar Hakim. It’s a nice version of the original song but not transformative.

The transformation comes with “I Burn for You.” From the paranoiac, tense version on Brimstone and Treacle, the tune’s rebirth as a torch song is something of a surprise. Arrangement-wise, this is another one that opens with an arpeggio on both piano and guitar under Sting’s gentle melody. But it grows in intensity into the bridge as Branford layers a counter-melody over the crashing drums and questing bass line. Sting improvises vocally on the chorus as the band floats into a dreamy version of the “Brimstone” theme, given an entirely different character by Branford’s harmonization, and the song extends into a sort of reverie over a deep chord progression in the keys and bass. A swell of cheering seems out of place in the midst of this section; viewing the concert film reveals that Sting has pulled out his custom upright bass and started to play the Brimstone theme on it. The record fades out here rather than break the spell; in the concert video the band shifts gears into a long, higher energy improv over the Brimstone vamp, in one of the most satisfactory moments of the whole show, complete with some seriously Copeland-esque drum work from Hakim and a saxophone solo from Branford that betters anything that made it onto the record.

The last side of the album opens with “Another Day,” here transformed from the synth-driven New Wave energy of the b-side to a jazzy acoustic arrangement anchored by Kenny Kirkland’s piano and Omar Hakim’s percussion. Branford gets a good solo between verses, and Janice and Dolette’s harmonies carry the chorus, but otherwise this is a straightforward reading of the song. But “Children’s Crusade” is another story. Like “Moon Over Bourbon Street,” this starts as a straightforward translation of the record’s arrangement to the bandstand, with Kenny Kirkland’s piano substituting for the keyboards of the original. When we get to Branford’s sax solo following the chorus, though, we’re in deeper territory. Here we hear reams of ideas unspooling from his soprano sax, with Coltrane-esque “sheets of sound,” playing against the rhythm, and a seamless transition into the heraldic motif of the final chorus. It’s easily his best moment on the record, and one could wish that the producers had captured more moments like this from the performances.

In “Down So Long,” we have a peek of some of Sting’s affection for old American R&B, as previously heard on the Party Party soundtrack. Written by blues guitarist J.B. Lenoir and Alex Atkins, the track is here given a straightforward blues romp with a tight keyboard solo from Kirkland and a quiet coda on the last verse. (The song previously appeared in a duet with Jeff Beck on the 1985 cancer research benefit compilation Live! For Life, which I hadn’t heard before today.) The album closes with “Tea in the Sahara,” which gets a swinging shuffle from Darryl Jones’ bass, transforming the arid feeling of the Synchronicity track into something of a victory lap for the band. Again, Branford’s saxophone uplifts the final outro, playing into some atmospheric guitar work from Sting and an off-kilter piano pattern from Kenny.

You can get by without having heard Bring on the Night; the live album doesn’t introduce any material not heard elsewhere. But it serves as a transformation of the material, shaped by the tremendous abilities of this band, even if the versions on the record are sometimes paler shadows of the energy of the live improvisations captured in the movie. In some ways the playfulness and energy of the performances make this my favorite of Sting’s recordings. He wouldn’t be this unmannered and spontaneous very often throughout his career; as Trudie Styler says in an interview early in the film, it’s down to the influence of these American jazz musicians that we get to see a Sting who laughs and engages in true band dynamics in these performances.

We’re going to briefly turn from his music back to the music of the jazz musicians who sparked this musical rebirth. But first we’re going to see what happened to Wynton Marsalis’s sound after he fired his brother and Kenny Kirkland for joining Sting’s band. That’ll come next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: I strongly recommend watching at least the first half of Bring on the Night (the movie). Apted has a way of getting true things to come out of the mouths of the participants in the film and the band rehearsal scenes are a lot of fun to watch. But if you don’t watch anything else, you owe it to yourself to watch this bit as Sting and the band cook up a quick cover of the “Flintstones” theme:

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: