Tag: minocinelu

Sting, …Nothing Like the Sun

Sting’s double-LP 1987 release is his last to feature a heavy jazz influence, and he goes out in strong form, with Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Manu Katché, Mino Cinelu, and a guest appearance from Gil Evans.

Album of the Week, April 26, 2025

So it is that we come to Sting’s second solo album, and I have to warn you that I’m not sure I can be objective about this one. I was fourteen, almost fifteen when …Nothing Like the Sun, complete with its elliptical title, was released, and it pretty much consumed me. My parents gave me a copy on cassette; I joined a CD club, in part, to get a copy on CD. The tour was my first rock concert, at William and Mary Hall. For goodness’ sake, it was “Sister Moon” that got me attention from girls when I sang at a talent show at the Governor’s School for the Sciences in the summer of 1989.

So let’s dive right in. “The Lazarus Heart” opens the album at full tilt and with seemingly every musician (as noted last week, both Omar Hakim and Darryl Jones did not return from Sting’s first solo album) making themselves known in the first couple of bars. There’s an arpeggiated guitar riff from none other than Andy Summers, over layers of more guitar and keyboards, percussion from Mino Cinelu and a bass pattern that seeks up to the supertonic. After four measures, Manu Katché’s snare and cymbals announce the start of the song. Branford and Kenny Kirkland play the opening hook together on soprano saxophone and a keyboard that sounds an awful lot like a flute. Sting’s vocals are syncopated and push and pull against the tempo as he tells the story of a dream of his mother and a wound in his heart. Even had Sting not dedicated the album to his mother’s memory, you would be able to tell that she loomed large in his subconscious still, seven years after he hurt both his parents with his words in a Rolling Stone interview. The arrangement itself feels dreamlike, with Andy Summers’ guitar and Kenny Kirkland’s keyboards echoing and washing around the corners of the song. There’s a brilliant moment at the bridge where Branford takes the tune out of the syncopated beat it’s been in since the start and pulls it into straight measure for about eight beats, and another in the last chorus where everyone but Mino Cinelu’s percussion drops out, revealing the richness of the arrangement by its absence.

Andy Summers sticks around for “Be Still My Beating Heart” (Sting asks in the liner notes, “Why does tradition locate our emotional center at the heart and not somewhere in the brain?”). This is a gentler song, but not a ballad, driven by a bass figure (doubled in the keyboards) that runs up from the dominant to the tonic, and washes of Andy Summers guitar that blend into saxophone obbligatos, all driven by the pulse of the percussionists. There’s subtle vocal harmony on the chorus and almost subliminal piano parts happening under the pre-chorus; the latter becomes apparent when the vocals drop out in the second chorus. The whole thing is the closest Sting ever got to writing a Sade song.

“Englishman In New York” stands as another in a long line of early Sting songs that are driven on the back of a busy synthesizer part, in this case a pizzicato string part that makes up the majority of the arrangement for the first verse of the song (turning into synth strings for the bridge). Thankfully there’s also a fantastic Branford Marsalis through-line on the soprano sax, as well as some top-notch contributions by Manu Katché (the hi-hat! the snare work on the first verse!) and Mino Cinelu (a fine use of the cuíca throughout the chorus). Branford gets a properly swinging solo verse after the bridge, with fine support from Kenny Kirkland. The whole thing was written as an homage to Quentin Crisp, as Sting reports in the liner notes.; there was a movie made of the gay icon’s last years in New York titled after the song, starring John Hurt.

“History Will Teach Us Nothing” is the one reggae-inflected song on the album, Sting having mostly moved well beyond the days of Reggatta de Blanc by now. The groove, with guitar, bass, drums and percussion, is tight, but unfortunately the trick of doubling the sax with the keyboards seems to water down both here. Sting is in verbose mode, working on the theme of “Spirits in the Material World” and “Love is the Seventh Way,” calling for us to stop repeating history’s mistakes in the most provocative way possible—telling us to stop listening to it. Alas, we now know what happens when you ignore signs that history is repeating itself… I would say, though, that the outro chorus (“Know your human rights/be what you come here for”) is now perhaps more relevant than ever.

This takes us into the most topical song on the album, which I spent years thinking was on the wrong side of topicality until this year. Sting has talked about his writing process for the album following the death of his mother, as he retreated to an apartment in New York in a monastic existence; when he debuted this song and others to friends, they were powerfully moved but he didn’t feel it, having been locked inside his head for too long. “They Dance Alone (Cueca Solo)” is potentially a moving song, and certainly made more powerful by Sting’s focus on the “mothers of the disappeared,” who danced by themselves in anguished protest against the abductions and murders of their loved ones by the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. After years of performing in Amnesty benefits, he had fully inhabited the grief as well as the outrage of this cause. It’s unfortunate that this performance is the most adult contemporary of all the songs on the album; stretching to over seven minutes long, the song doesn’t even get Branford Marsalis until the last verse, and it wastes guest guitarists Eric Clapton, Fareed Haque, and Mark Knopfler, who seem to disappear into the texture of the song. I would totally write this one off, but for two things: the brilliant outro, when Kenny Kirkland finally can kick things into high gear by going into double time and Branford is let off the leash; and the fact that we now have more than enough opportunities to dance alone, without having to go to Chile.

“Fragile” ends this topical segment of the album with one of Sting’s finest ballads, written in memory of Ben Linder, an American civil engineer killed by the Nicaraguan contras in 1987 while he was working on a hydroelectric project. It succeeds where “They Dance Alone” fails by virtue of its brevity and restraint, with the majority of the song carried by the gentle percussion of Cinelu and Katché and by Sting’s remarkable Spanish-style guitar work. “Fragile” has been the touchstone to which Sting has returned in his career at times of national grief; it took on extra resonance as the lead-off song of All This Time, an acoustic set from his Tuscan villa that was recorded on September 11, 2001 as the musicians became aware of the facts of the attacks.

I wrote about “We’ll Be Together” last week at least in part so I wouldn’t have to this week. (There are a lot of songs on this album!) So let’s skip ahead. “Straight To My Heart” is another straight-up love song, and another one built on a programmed keyboard riff, but again it’s substantially improved by the percussion; here Katché and Cinelu play polyrhythms throughout, and the cuica makes another appearance. There’s another of those whistly synth lines throughout the chorus, but it works better here, and the whole thing has the feeling of a sonnet in 7/4. It’s a great band-kid song by virtue of the unusual meter; when I saw Sting live for the third time in Richmond in 1993 with my sister and her friends Jeremy and Christina, we made his band double-take as we bobbed our heads in perfect 7/4 time to this song.

“Rock Steady” is that rarity, a Sting song with a sense of humor. Despite the name, this is more a blues than a reggae number. As Sting retells the story of Noah’s Ark in a modern setting, we get imitations of the cries of the animals, whether by the sampler or by members of the band I’ve never quite been clear. Sting tells the story of two young lovers who get dragooned into helping Noah with the animals during the flood; once they’ve finally found dry land at the end and are leaving the boat, one of the backing vocalists (I’ve always imagined it’s Janice Pendarvis) teasingly asks, “Got any more bright ideas?” We don’t get too many laugh-out-loud moments in Sting’s oeuvre, so I take this one while I can.

“Sister Moon” is a saxophone feature and a dark ballad, in some ways reminiscent of “Moon Over Bourbon Street.” But where that song’s arrangement builds from acoustic bass to keyboard and saxophone, here the track builds on washes of synthesizer sound, with only Branford’s playing to break it up. Thankfully he gives a bravura performance. I somehow found a saxophone player at the Governor’s School for the Sciences at Virginia Tech in July of 1989 and he learned the part by ear. We performed it twice, and by the time we were done I had decided I wanted to sing for the rest of my life.

Ironically, “Little Wing” is the other song I’ve performed from this album, about 21 years and change ago. The arrangement on this album is pretty special, marking Sting’s first collaboration with the great Gil Evans, whom we last saw working with Miles Davis in Carnegie Hall, and whom I mentioned had cut a killer version of “Murder by Numbers” with Sting in the late 1980s. This is where that collaboration started, though apparently Sting had met him years previously at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London. The arrangement is an endorphin overload, with Evans’ orchestra and keyboards supporting Sting’s vocals as he sings the hell out of the Jimi Hendrix standard. Mostly what you hear, though, is Hiram Bullock’s guitar, which gets a great solo that transitions into a cool take from Branford before Sting recaps the verse once more at the end. (Bullock, who died in 2008, had played on a variety of rock and fusion recordings, including playing on Steely Dan’s “My Rival” from Gaucho and Paul Simon’s “That’s Why God Made the Movies” from One Trick Pony.)

On this album, “Little Wing” serves as the center of a three-song set about love, moving from the inchoate mooning of “Sister Moon” into a declaration of love that seems to combine muscular feats of strength with moments of heavenward striving. The last song on the album moves into something considerably more intimate. “The Secret Marriage” was written to a tune by blacklisted German composer Hanns Eisler, who partnered with Bertolt Brecht in both Weimar Germany and in the United States and who composed scores for some 40 films, before being run out of American on a rail by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Sting performed one of the duo’s songs, “An Den Kleinen Radio-Apparat,” in 1987 and adapted the song’s melody for “The Secret Marriage.” It’s an intensely private statement of love, and is a striking note on which to end …Nothing Like the Sun, as if declaring an end to the rule of the King of Pain.

The album cycle for …Nothing Like the Sun, from its release through the tour and the eventual follow-up, lasted for almost four years. During that time a great many things changed, including the almost complete cessation of new music releases on vinyl in the United States. You can find a copy of the follow-up, The Soul Cages, on LP but you have to really look hard, and the subsequent albums weren’t released in vinyl form in the US, or at all. (There’s still no US release of Ten Summoner’s Tales on vinyl, to my surprise.) Sting also played less jazz following the completion of this song cycle; though Kenny Kirkland played on The Soul Cages and Branford guested on a few songs, for the most part Sting has stayed straight on in the pop lane ever since. But Branford’s career as a bandleader was just taking off; we’ll hear one of his quartet’s albums next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: There were some really interesting b-sides from this album. Last week we heard “Conversation with a Dog,” but there was also the jazz piece “Ghost in the Strand,” a pop song that maybe should have made the album (“If You There”), Sting’s well-done cover of Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and an adventurous collaboration with Gil Evans on Jimi Hendrix’s “Up From the Skies.” (I wrote about getting “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Up From the Skies” off a 3-inch CD single, with some difficulty and an adapter, some time ago.) The last spawned a full concert collaboration between Sting and the septuagenarian arranger/bandleader at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy in 1987; you can watch that widely bootlegged performance below:

BONUS BONUS: There’s a popular but as far as I can tell apocryphal story that the song “The Lazarus Heart” was written for the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, to be played over a scene that would have come from the original novel in which Roger is killed at the end of the movie. Sad to say, there is no footage combining the two.

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).

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: