"Are you wet?" Mighty Sting coyly queried his adoring school-girl throng, screaming for his sensitive touch in vain. "Between my legs, Sting," I cooed, captivated by this blonde Hannibal's charm, panache and noble support for oppressed minorities such as coal miners, jazz musicians, starving Ethiopians and vampires. No empty hunk he (but no intimacy), and though thousands swooned in the bask of his croon, his credo stood firm: "Don't stand so close to me."
For all Gordon Sumner's smarts and outreach, rarely has this much talent been so muddled in contradictions. The awshucks boyishness of this anglo-Mack The Knife's stage presence could not shade his self-defeating mania for control. Instead of magic, Sting's calculated three-card-monte schtick undercut a powerful, happy stage show, engaging enongh to occasionally animate even the puerile material that studded his double-platinum Blue Turtle like so many tacky rhinestones.
How else does one explain Sting's much-bruited search for the best "jazz" musicians money can buy; his manifestoes on expanding the intelligence quotient in rock; an amphitheatre stage setting which literally put his collaborators on a pedestal; and the incredibly short leash he kept them on. All dressed up with no place to go, they allow Sting to bask in their black, brown and beige glow, sometimes taking off the training wheels to cruise withont reference to vocals, leading to highlights like "When The World Is Running Down," which came closest to the kind of jazz/R&B feeling Sting professes to seek--and so routinely achieves with Stewart and Andy. On a long coda to "Brimstone and Treacle," cowbell virtuoso Branford Marsalis' snaking saxophone improv brought things to a near-polytonal catharsis, culminating in a furious drums-keyboard dialogue between Omar Hakim and Kenny Kirkland that encouraged Sting to drop postures and Stratocaster in favor of his upright bass for a brief, swinging hint of where this band might have taken the music.
Sting's problem is he wants it both ways. Everything he sees he wants to possess, yet if you love somebody set them free. So on his didactic new tunes, his keening vocals modulate smartly over chord changes, while the band gets to solo over redundant modes, separate but equal; and his jazz-blues material doesn't depict a communal ensemble, but a patronizing fusion showpiece for an itinerant skiffle player. Just when yon think he's really about to go crazy, he'll slam on the brakes-all that jazz power is wasted italicizing great songs like "Every Breath You Take" with superfluous art-rock bluster. And when his priest- in-vampire' s- vestments lamly struggles "with my instincts in the pale moonlight" and you're about to lose your lunch, he'll slip in something human and genuinely felt and cross yon up. Difficult to love, impossible to hate, toying differently with his great talent, Sting confounds your expectations while fulfilling his.
Pity, because for all the pathos, Sting's blues are a put-on, ambition on the make. For all the reach there's not much grasp. Police don't go, 'cause then we'll ask, O Sting, where is thy depth?
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