The Dream of the Blue Turtles - Sting

Additional Info:

Select: Personnel Description Artist Comments Liner Notes

Review from Rolling Stone magazine by Jon Pareles

With the Police on hiatus, Sting had choices galore for ways to make his inevitable solo album. The most obvious was to become the world's best-qualified Police imitator; what he did instead smacks of brilliantly enlightened self-interest.

Der Stingle chose to form a new band with young jazz hotshots from Weather Report (drummer Omar Hakim) and the Miles Davis group (bassist Darryl Jones), plus saxophonist Branford Marsalis and keyboardist Kenny Kirkland. These aren't the usual sleepy gang of veteran sidemen; they never bothered to learn pop-jazz clichés, but they know their Jimi Hendrix, Chic, Herbie Hancock and Led Zeppelin, along with their Duke Ellington.

Unlike Joni Mitchell another Big Blond Star who attempted this kind of jazzification, Sting can swing. You can hear how much fun he's having, and how much goosing he gets from the band, in the remake of the Police's Shadows in the Rain. The spooky, dubwise reggae tune from 'Zenyatta Mondatta' now steams along like a workout by soul-jazz organist Jimmy Smith. Kirkland pumps out organ chords over Hakim's stomp, while Sting and Marsalis dodge each others' syncopations around the bass line.

But except for Shadows, the bluesy 'Consider Me Gone' and an instrumental, 'Blue Turtles', that grafts progressive 1960s jazz onto a Weather Report march, 'The Dream Of The Blue Turtles' is a pop record above all. It's only a jam session between the lines, where Marsalis answers Sting's voice with slyly ubiquitous fanfares and curlicues and epigrams.

Sting still writes short, modal melody lines, and sometimes he plays around with the Police's quiet marches (à? la King of Pain) and Afro-Anglo-Caribbean rhythms - to do anything else would be like changing his fingerprints. But if you listen to the way verses and phrases end, there are new twists, surprising extended chords by way of Steely Dan, Weather Report and Ellington. Although Sting is working with world-class improvisers, many of his new band's arrangements are more structured than tracks by the Police. That amazing trio could juggle rhythm and lead roles like nobody's business, while a quintet that tried the same openness would find itself in chaos. The new band is also punchier than the Police, because Kirkland's keyboards - especially the organ - reinforce the rhythm, and the Hakim/Jones team packs a mighty wallop.

Solo albums are traditionally variety shows and statements of purpose, and 'The Dream Of The Blue Turtles' is a little of both. Sting delves into neo-vaudeville with 'Moon Over Bourbon Street' and seriouso classical hymnology with 'Russians', a disarmament song. He also comments on the British miners' strike ('We Work The Black Seam') on lost generations ('Children's Crusade') and on matters philosophical and epistemological ('Love Is The Seventh Wave' and 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free').

When I saw the band in concert (as you should when it tours this summer) its musical exuberance was contagious: I kept losing track of the lyrics in the brainy kicks of the music. On record, things are a little more sober - and, to my taste, too earnest.

It was easy to see it coming. Sting has been driven to tears by world problems since the Police's third-world tour. Yet I'd suspect that the rest of the band edited his pronouncements for commercial zoning; without them, he does tend to go on about "All the bloodshed all the anger / All the weapons all the greed / All the armies all the missiles / All the symbols of our fear," as he does on 'Love Is The Seventh Wave'.

'Children's Crusade' makes a rather tenuous connection between soldiers in World War I and young drug users. 'We Work The Black Seam', - with a winding melody chat suggests climbing and descending and with a rhythm track like the clang of picks - extrapolates from neat denunciations of Thatcherism ("We matter more than pounds and pence / Your economic theory makes no sense") and nuclear power ("Bury the waste in a great big hole") to goofy stuff about the universe. Sting acts worried about carbon 14, which must be easier to rhyme than plutonium.

I'm all for political songs, and there's no better vehicle for them than a megastar album. Yet Sting sabotages good intentions when he gets preachy or spacey or sanctimonious. 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free' is a postgrammatical, T-shirt sentiment and a denunciation of possessiveness that would be a lot more convincing issued by someone other than a millionaire. If Sting really believes that we can be happy with less, he can send me 0,000 care of this magazine.

So dump the lyric sheet and enjoy the tunes: the transparency of 'We Work The Black Seam', the way 'Children's Crusade' slowly spirals to its climax, the Caribbean lilt of 'Love Is The Seventh Wave', the impassioned singing on If You Love Somebody Set Them Free and the delicate-to-martial dynamics of 'Fortress Around Your Heart', which evokes Pete Townshend and Steely Dan, along with the Police. Sting the musician has more to say than Sting the deep thinker - especially when he's paced, and pushed, by extraordinary young musicians.

---

Review from The Sydney Morning Herald by Henry Everingham

Do you remember love songs? "Real" love songs. You know? The ones with music sounding like it came from some tacky musical and lyrics that contained at least a dozen "babys" - not to mention the obligatory "if you leave me, I'll drive Dad's car over Niagara Falls" sentiment.

Well, those songs are still out there, somewhere. Only we don't hear them so much any more, because for the last seven years, the Top 40 has been ruled by Sting, and his immensely popular band The Police.

Not that Sting doesn't write love songs. Indeed he does. But the subject of his love songs is not your average cheated-teenage-sweetheart. His subjects tend to be prisoners in chains and dominating beasts, all thrown in with a liberal dose of Jungian theory. Even in The Police's hit 'Wrapped Around Your Finger', Sting denied being Mephistopheles. (How many spotty-faced kids out there watching Countdown know who Mephistopheles is?)

If that's the kind of music that turns you on, then you'll be thrilled to learn that Sting has released his long awaited solo album. However, first things first. Despite all the guff you may have heard about 'The Dream Of The Blue Turtles' being a jazz inspired album, forget it. Certainly, he has employed a variety of musicians with solid backgrounds in the vein of Weather Report, but it is still basically Sting's style of pop music. And naturally, it still sounds like The Police. What made that band sound so good was not so much their deft musical style, but Sting's rasping lead vocals.

Still, 'The Dream Of The Blue Turtles' is one remarkably fine album. I (and no doubt many others) had thought Sting had reached his pinnacle with the last Police album, 'Synchronicity', but he has proved us wrong and returned with a collection of rather daunting songs dealing mainly with relationships and that now perennial favourite, war.

---

Review from Billboard magazine by author unknown

Perhaps the most anticipated release of the summer, and the wait proves well worth it: Police vocalist/bassist's solo collection features 10 tunes, and not a throwaway in the batch. First single, 'If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free', is already a hit, and 'Fortress Around Your Heart' appears to be lined up as the second single. But aside from raising an eyebrow towards the charts, Sting's album has to be admired for its strong identity and wealth of ideas. The Monk-ish title tune and ambitious compositions like 'We Work The Black Seam' and 'Moon Over Bourbon Street' are the work of an original artist. First class.

---

Review from The Miami Herald by Tom Moon

Using opium as the connecting image, a historian draws sharp parallels between the loss of young life during World War I and drug abuse today. Unemployed coal miners mourn the onslaught of a sophisticated and frightening power supply: "One day in a nuclear age, they may understand our rage/Build machines that they can't control, then bury the waste in a great big hole." A concerned citizen, frustrated by the cumbersome rhetoric of U.S.-Soviet detente, says with cautious resignation: "I hope the Russians love their children, too."

This cast of characters comes from the debut solo project by Sting, bass-playing leader of the rock trio The Police, scheduled for nationwide release today by A&M records.

'The Dream of the Blue Turtles' is a collection of 10 somewhat-experimental, fiercely focused pop compositions performed by a crack team of young jazz talent. It is not the new Police album, though at first it is hard not to imagine Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland supporting the fiery-voiced Sting (a.k.a. Gordon Sumner) with their trademark minimalist accompaniment.

But since 'Dream' is an extension of his development as a songwriter, Sting has appropriated a more personalized sound to compliment it. The goal, he has said, was to forge a connection between rigid pop formulas and the creative spark of improvised music. Like a chemist confident of his materials but unsure how his experiment would turn out, Sting took chances.

It worked.

For this experimentation he hired saxman Branford Marsalis and keyboardist Kenny Kirkland - both from the ranks of mainstream jazz artist Wynton Marsalis' band. Miles Davis' current bassist, Darrell Jones, was enlisted; his rhythm section partner is Weather Report drummer Omar Hakim.

Sting, whose resume looks almost lightweight by comparison, plays jangling rhythm guitar and Synclavier synthesizer, but his voice is the focus of attention throughout - in growling, soaring lead lines as well as loosely structured background roles. He plans to tour with this band this summer and is filming an hour-long documentary to trace the evolution of the project. 'Dream of the Blue Turtles' is clearly Sting's new thing.

It catches the singer/songwriter moving away from the fleeting images of Syncronicity toward sustained, long-view scenarios reminiscent of musical theater. 'Moon Over Bourbon Street', a recasting of the standard Autumn Leaves, might be called "Confessions of a Wayward Vampire." The opening R&B raveup, 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free', works as a companion to the Police hit 'Every Breath You Take': Here the obsessed lover has learned what it takes to keep a relationship alive and is happy to dispense the advice. Then 'Fortress Around Your Heart' cloes the album with a fantastical allegory on the risks of past mistakes.

Though Sting's poetry has become more detailed and immediate, it is not necessarily any more revealing. A deliberate air of mystery surrounds compositions such as the steel-drum flavored 'Love Is The Seventh Wave' and the cool 'Consider Me Gone': At every turn the churning instrumental interaction help shadow the true intention of his lyric. Only two compositions ('Set Them Free' and 'Shadows In The Rain') break out of the languid, medium-tempo mold Sting has cast; this similarity is the album's biggest weakness.

Throughout 'Dreams', Sting adapts the manner of an expert bandleader, allowing his sidemen to do what they do best: drummer Hakim shoots for a steady, crisp pulse dusted with cymbals - gone are the abrupt polyrhythms Copeland used as punctuation. Marsalis' job is to add a soulful edge where Sting has neglected it, and his soprano sax is a vital element on 'Love Is The Seventh Wave' and 'Children's Crusade'. Kirkland's synthesizers provide orchestrally thick padding, though the pompous Slavic theme of Russians would have been better served by an authentic brass choir.

By sandwiching experimental numbers such as 'Children's Crusade' and the title track between more conventional, pop-oriented material, Sting has created a coherent, seamless work bonded by a sense of looseness. There are moments of ecstatic music here: the shrill, almost panicked chorus of 'We Work The Black Seam', Sting's evenly measured vocal crescendos on Fortress. As the primary architect for The Police, Sting developed a sound that was urgent and irresistible. Now he delicately alters the proportions in order to further personalize his solo concept, and the result is a bold "fusion" worth noting.

---

Review from The Washington Post by J D Considine

Pop idols aren't exactly known for taking risks, throwing their audience curve balls or walking away from sure things. Yet that's exactly what Sting has done with 'The Dream of the Blue Turtles', his solo debut.

Unlike the outside projects of his cohorts Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, this is no mere Policeman's holiday, for what Sting has attempted is a marriage of pop and bop that pushes beyond the traditional notion of fusion music.

Rather than try to mix and match the two styles, Sting works a middle ground that leaves room enough for a walking bass and aggressive solos and, at the same time, sticks plenty close to the melody. On the best material - 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free', 'Childrens' Crusade', and 'Fortress Around Your Heart' - Sting supplies swing and sophistication without losing the melodic appeal that powers The Police's best work.

Unfortunately, that balance is not maintained throughout the album. Sometimes, saxophonist Branford Marsalis and keyboardist Kenny Kirkland seem unnecessarily constrained; at others, the listener yearns for the music to break free. Drummer Omar Hakim is a powerhouse player, but lacks the polyrhythmic fluidity Stewart Copeland uses to lighten The Police sound. Add in Sting's tendency to preach ("There is a deeper world than this/That you don't understand" from 'Love Is the Seventh Wave'), and 'The Dream of the Blue Turtles' ends up an only partly successful experiment.

---

Review from People magazine by R.N.

The lyrics are penetrating enough to make you think of Yeats. The voice sounds like a more thoughtful Rod Stewart. The music is an unpredictable combination of rock, jazz and socially conscious folk. The man behind this remarkably passionate, thoughtful album is, of course, on leave from the Police. But nothing the Police have done - as entertaining as the group is - could have prepared anyone for this distinctive album. The songs, all written by Sting, are filled with allusions to nuclear war, pollution, despair and other concerns of our era. In the reggaeish 'Love Is the Seventh Wave', he sings of "All the bloodshed, all the anger/All the armies, all the missiles." In 'Consider Me Gone', he comments, "The search for perfection is all very well/But to look for heaven is to live here in hell." Sting avoids pretension with bitingly energetic and wide-ranging music. There are splendid contributions from keyboardist Kenny Kirkland and especially saxophonist Branford Marsalis, whose solos offer annotations to the lyrics. Sting also demonstrates a sly sense of humor. He ends 'Seventh Wave' with a comment on a Police pop hit, idly singing, "With every breath you take/Every move you make/Every cake you bake/Every leg you break." His more serious moments are impressive too, as in the evocative 'Moon Over Bourbon Street': "The brim of my hat hides the eye of a beast/I've the face of a sinner but the hands of a priest." This album will set minds to spinning and toes to tapping. It adds a new dimension to the fierce appeal of its creator.

---

Review from The Times by Richard Williams

To his great credit Sting has opted in his first solo album for the spontaneity that has made the Police an exceptional group. 'The Dream of the Blue Turtles' may well have cost as much as the half a million pounds that it took Bryan Ferry to piece together Boys and Girls, but it certainly does not give that impression. All the 10 tracks sound as though they were recorded by a small group of musicians playing together at the same time, exploring material undulled by over-familiarity, mixed on to tape more or less as they stood.

This, presumably, is what Sting was after when he drew into the project young American jazz musicians of the calibre of Branford Marsalis (saxophones), Darryl Jones (bass), Kenny Kirkland (piano) and Omar Hakim (drums). To ask such men to overdub on rhythms set by electronic drums and synthesizers would be like inviting one of the Roux brothers to pour the tomato ketchup over your Big Mac.

The best of this music jumps and flows with pronounced rhythmic vivacity, notably the first single, 'If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free', the slinkily jazzy 'Consider Me Gone', and the burstingly melodic 'Fortress Around Your Heart', which builds through a rather shapeless verse to its indelible chorus in the best tradition of the Police. On the rowdy 'Shadows in the Rain', young Marsalis sounds both amused and pleased by being asked to impersonate Clarence Clemons, a task he achieves with honours.

The worst of it meanders in a dream, grasping at Sting's own cliches - the melodies of 'Russians' (despite its acknowledged borrowing from Prokifiev), 'Children's Crusade' and the streamlined reggae of 'Love is the Seventh Wave' - and grappling inconclusively with Big Themes. For all its careful craftsmanship, even the already celebrated 'We Work the Black Seam', his impassioned defence of the miners' strike, lacks the mysterious dimension that turns propaganda into art.

---

Review from Newsweek magazine by Jim Miller

'The Dream of the Blue Turtles' is the latest excursion in Sting's ongoing crusade to break down the barriers between different types of music. With the Police, he dabbed first in punk rock and then in reggae, slowly developing a distinctive voice and style. By 1983 and Synchronicity - the fifth and best Police album - the style was complete. Carefully layering different musical tracks in the studio and using synthesizers to create ostinato figures, chiming tones and orchestral textures, Sting seamlessly blended Slavic melodies, modal scales and African and Caribbean rhythms into a kind of high-tech global folk music.

Now, in his first solo recording, Sting has gone in a different direction, recruiting four gifted younger jazz players in an effort to reinvent his musical synthesis. He is scarcely the first person, of course, to attempt a fusion of jazz and rock. Organist Bill Doggett, who once played with the big band of Lucky Millinder, did it in 1956 with 'Honky Tonk'. More recent - and self-conscious - examples include Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell and the currently popular British singer Sade. The most artistically successful of these recent fusions, the jazz-based band Weather Report and the pop group Steely Dan, succeeded in part because they largely eschewed improvisation, swing and the three-chord simplicities of traditional rock in favor of angular riffs and pastel tone poems.

Though Sting follows a similar approach, it works only fitfully. Confined within tight arrangements, his musicians rarely have a chance to cut loose. Even so, the players get their licks in. Keyboard player Kenny Kirkland contributes fleetsizer choruses made to sound like a slippery celeste, but the real standou is saxophonist Branford Marsalis. He quietly shines throughout, playing obligatos, often on soprano sax, with a terse eloquence reminiscent of Weather Report's Wayne Shorter (who once helped out Steely Dan in similar fashion).

Too Clever: As a composer, Sting is nothing if not resourceful. Like much of his writing, 'Russians' is too clever by half, but puts its Prokofiev theme to wonderfully atmospheric use. 'Moon Over Bourbon Street' is a floating lament. 'Children's Crusade' skillfully evokes the appropriate mood - the sound of distant bells is a typical touch.

One of the most striking aspects of Sting's music remains his singing. Despite its thiness, his tenor has an attractively sandy grain, given texture by his deft use of growls, falsetto and the full range of modern recording techniques, from phasing and filtering to overdubs and reverb. On some ballads his voice seems to hang in the air like mist. And when he lights into the right kind of song - 'Every Breath You Take' or 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free' - he manages to enliven even his most studied hits with a flash of real feeling.

---

Review from The Los Angeles Times by Matt Damsker

Sting has gotten over his king-of-pain obsessiveness: "If you love somebody," he sings on the lead track of his first solo album, "set them free." And so he sets a generous tone. And lovingly, he frees us of the Jungian densities and pathological tilt of the last Police album, 'Synchronicity', and its arch-possessive ballad, 'Every Breath You Take'.

On 'The Dream of the Blue Turtles', the Police chief voices a clear, anti-war, global valentine amid a boggling array of polished, passionate yet subtly insinuating tunes. This is music fully liberated from the three-man reggae-pop cage of the Police. Instead, Sting meshes with a jazzy four-man group: drummer Omar Hakim, bassist Darryl Jones, keyboardist Kenny Kirkland and saxophonist Branford Marsalis, whose precisely inspired lyricism carries the album's wealth of mood.

Marsalis is a star attraction, certainly, yet the album is no less Sting's triumph. The sharp tenor slap and grainy croon of his vocals have never been more expressive or varied, and his stylistic depth is evident at each turn. The aggressive R&B charge of 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free' yields to the congenial reggae of 'Love Is the Seventh Wave'. The naively beautiful 'Russians', in which Sting salves his nuclear fears with a "hope the Russians love their children too," swells with a synthesized snatch of Prokofiev.

Then comes 'Children's Crusade', a mournful look back to World War I ("Poppies for young men/such bitter trade... all for a children's crusade") that equates its legacy with the drugged hopelessness of Britain's modern youth, Marsalis' horn an elegiac underscore. Here, as elsewhere on the album, the sense of a strongly sympathetic collaboration between gifted players is profound. On 'Shadows in the Rain', a full-tilt boogie propels the track - a whiskey-voiced hangover tale - into that rare realm where singer, song and band are thoroughly loose yet perfectly balanced.

Side 2 opens with an extraordinary ballad, 'We Work the Black Seam', which builds on a minimal five-note figure and Marsalis' atonal accents. The song laments the deadly byproducts of the nuclear industry from the angry, unsung viewpoint of mine workers ("One day in a new clear age/they may understand our rage/Build machines that they can't control/and bury the waste in great big hole...").

But there's a lighter touch here as well. 'Consider Me Gone' is a bluesy, lounge-jazz kiss-off of a love affair, while the album's title track instrumental is a slice of pure improvisational joy, echoing Brubeck. And 'Moon Over Bourbon Street' - inspired by Anne Rice's novel, 'Interview With the Vampire' - has the timeless sound and perfect melody of a pop standard, as Sting's double-bass paces an arrangement that hints of an infernal Mardi Gras and his voice superbly enacts the tale of an ambivalent bloodsucker.

Even hard-core Police fans will respond to the album's closer, 'Fortress Around Your Heart', which kicks in a stirring rock chorus and cements the album's theme of building bridges with love and reassessment. Yet there's not a hint of pandering about this album. There's continuity enough between Sting's Police record and this solo blotter, but when he coyly fades out one song with a joking reference to "every move you make, every cake you bake," it's clear that he's found a higher emotional and broader musical ground.

Without losing sight of the pop audience, Sting has delivered a brilliant, uncompromised fusion of pop and jazz. It manages to transcend the self-centered "solo album" format with every collective breath it takes.

Available From:

AND