Alas, it was not to be, as the band was rife with internal personality conflicts, and in 1985, lead singer and bassist Sting (nee Gordon Sumner) announced the release of his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles. It was to be a jazz-influenced album that featured established jazz musician such as saxophonist Branford Marsalis and Omar Hakim on drums. I bought the album upon its release with great anticipation.
Yeah, I hated it. I'm not much of a jazz fan at all. I appreciate the virtuosity of jazz musicians, but that style of music has never moved my heart and soul the way other music so often does. This didn't sound like anything The Police had ever done, and with my teenage immaturity, I had expected to get the version of Sting featured on MTV, not the artist he was striving to be.
Obviously, my attitude has shifted, since this is on my no-skip list now. MTV gave heavy airplay to the singles from the album, and with each subsequent listen, my affinity for the songs began to grow. As I opened myself up to listening to the whole album, I started to understand what Sting was doing with his music, and I saw how the jazz arrangements and instrumentation worked together. By the time I was in college, this was a regular favorite on the turntable. Today, I consider it a seminal classic in his career.
The album opens with the first single, "If You Love Somebody (Set Them Free)," a lyrical declaration of his own freedom from his previous band. It's an up-tempo song with a wonderful saxophone part. Next is "Love is the Seventh Wave," a calypso-influenced tune (remember, The Police began as a neo-ska band) that does something characteristic of jazz in that it self-references an earlier work; in this case, a lyrical snippet of The Police's "Every Breath You Take" as a clever coda at the end of the song.
Track three is the dark Cold War plea "Russians," reflective of our collective fear of global nuclear war with the USSR. It's heavy on synthesizers, and Sting's lyrics echo similar apocalyptic poetry. Track four is "Children's Crusade"; one of the most interesting things about this song is that it is set in 3/4 time (like a waltz), which is unusual for pop music. Side one closes with "Shadows in the Rain," which begins with vocals over a smoking drum rhythm, then kicks into high gear with all the musicians jamming like it's after midnight in a back-alley jazz club.
Side two opens with "We Work the Black Seam," a mid-tempo ballad with an environmental warning about the consequences of our industrial civilization. Next up is "Consider Me Gone," a song that fades in with vocals over bass and drum, a dark a mysterious song to the end. The third song is the title track, "The Dream of the Blue Turtles," a straight-up Be-Bop Jazz instrumental that primarily focus on piano. The penultimate song is "Moon Over Bourbon Street," a ballad that sounds like it belongs right in the midst of that familiar New Orleans address.
The album closes with one of Sting's best singles ever, "Fortress Around Your Heart." This was the song that grew on me the fastest and inspired me to keep listening to the album until it achieved its place among my favorite works in my collection. I love this album because it is the beginning of the transition from Sting as The Police's lead singer to Sting as a thoughtful and influential artist and song writer. He is one of the rare artists whose solo work exceeds his earlier band-based music. I've enjoyed most of what he's done since, but his first is one I listen to without a single skipped track, which is more amazing to me since after my first listen, I wanted to skip the whole album!
No comments:
Post a Comment