The masters of “abstraction” that Sting could never copy
When Sting was younger, his mother would introduce him to some of his favourite music of all time. It was often like a spiritual epiphany he hadn’t even fully understood at the time. “When I first heard ‘All Shook Up’ by Elvis Presley, I remember having a kind of catatonic fit, rolling around on the floor with excitement,” he once said.
It was in masters like Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard that Sting found the kind of blueprint that exuded pure, unfiltered energy, like there was some broader secret to enjoying music that went beyond the sum of its parts. Eventually, it became a conduit for some kind of escape in his own world, a realisation he had the moment he was given an old, scuffed Spanish guitar by a man on his home street.
“I fell on that thing like it was my saviour,” he recalled on This Culture Life, saying that he locked himself away for days, and by the time he could play a song, he knew it was his out. At the time, though, it wasn’t enough to know he had something special – he had to look around and look up to people who seemed like they’d done the same thing as him, writing and playing music from working-class backgrounds and gaining popularity from being authentic enough for people to love them.
While The Beatles taught him a lot about this in practice, Sting gained popularity by never masquerading his passion, acting as a true music lover who just wanted to do it because it felt like absolutely everything; a calling he would never get away from because it’d already run bone-deep. Even if he couldn’t always understand it. But Sting’s greatness also stemmed from his own self-awareness, especially when it came to learning the principles of music and the makers that changed the game forever.
Jazz, for most virtuosos, is where it all began. It’s where music transformed from an academic discipline of sorts to something more visceral, more spontaneous and hobbyist, a meticulous craft enabled only by those who seemed to have been gifted the power of excellence. “You just have to have it in you,” Billie Holiday once said, explaining how jazz wasn’t just something that stemmed from one person or a group of people but a distinctive feeling that goes on forever. “It’s good music and a good feeling.”
This is also a view Sting shares. Like Holiday, and other jazz fanatics like Nina Simone, the masters of jazz are undeniably the crux of everything we know and love about music, with a skill no one can replicate, not even the more skilled players of the contemporary age, like Sting himself. “I think it’s the quality of abstraction in their music,” he told Guitar Player in 2007.
He also picked out Miles Davis as someone he could never imitate, saying, “Trying to copy Miles Davis trumpet solos on the guitar is hard. At the time, I didn’t have enough theoretical knowledge, I hadn’t played long enough, so I couldn’t understand how you could abstract like that – both with note choices, and, in particular, time.” Praising the genre, he continued: “The time thing in jazz phrasing is really where it’s at – playing away from the time, playing out of the time, and playing across the bar lines.”
Adding: “You almost don’t know where they are, and yet they still come out right where they’re supposed to be. And, at the time, it seemed like piano and horn players were more abstract than guitarists.”
For Sting, therefore, jazz maintained the same kind of appeal others observed, almost surreal in nature, with clashing components of simplicity and complexity. It was all about feeling and drawing people in based on distinctive improvisational qualities, but could only be that way by understanding the core nuances that make it all happen. It’s an exact science, some might say, one Sting and countless others channelled in much of their own work.
