“I know every note”: The one song Sting listened to once a week
No one can claim to listen to the same type of music for the rest of their lives. Even though some fans swear up and down that rock music will forever be the greatest music ever to grace the planet, it’s always nice to switch things up and throw on a hip-hop record or have the courage to admit that some pop songs are actually good when they come on the radio. Sting never viewed any genre as particularly terrible, but he knew that some were more evergreen than others regarding his daily listening habits.
For someone who stood for the second generation of punks in the early days of The Police, Sting was never afraid to get weird with his music. Looking through many of their greatest hits, it’s not hard to find anything from calypso to reggae in the way they perform, as long as it was tied together with the right melody on tracks like ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ or ‘Walking on the Moon’.
Out of all the major punk acts coming out at the time, though, Sting never viewed pop music as a bad thing. As much as their debut song ‘Next to You’ read as a punky tune, the love song at the heart of it would have been easy enough to turn into a pop track if they had a little less aggression behind it. But for all that youthful energy, the frontman was never afraid to sound like a grown-up.
He had been a teacher long before the band had made it, and when listening to some of their deep cuts, it’s clear that he had a mature style when working on tracks like ‘Invisible Sun’. That meant not being afraid to break conventions, use different instruments, or, in the case of his bandmates, add in the occasional jazzy section so they could stretch themselves out a little bit more.
It’s hard to call them an authentic jazz band, but some chords in their tunes couldn’t be found on any other rock record. ‘Murder By Numbers’ is still quite catchy, but the chords that Andy Summers is playing underneath Sting the entire time remains one of the oddest chord progressions that anyone has ever laid down on a mainstream track, even managing to suit Sting’s melody and moving along with Stewart Copeland’s strange turnarounds.
“I play ‘So What’ by Miles Davis almost once a week because I find it stimulating intellectually to hear those guys exploring the range of their talents.”
Sting
Out of all the jazz greats that had come before him, though, Sting said that he always had time to include Miles Davis in everything that he was doing, saying, “I play ‘So What’ by Miles Davis almost once a week because I find it stimulating intellectually to hear those guys exploring the range of their talents. To hear John Coltrane play and Wynton Kelly, it thrills me every time and I know every note.”
While Davis and Coltrane are miles ahead of Sting and Summers in terms of technical ability, it’s not hard to see how they compare to what The Police were doing at the time. In both bands, it’s easy to hear them bouncing off each other, almost throwing different melodic ideas at each other on every track, and the other responding with the perfect lick or hanging back a little bit to let the other person grandstand.
S,o despite choosing rock as his main passion, Sting always had that jazz flair whenever he came up with something new. Anyone can go on autopilot and play songs that their audience wants to hear, but for the true musicians, their songs are a living, breathing entity, and that means treating all of them like a new experience whenever working in the field.
