Jazz à Vienne: From pop to jazz, the many facets of a fascinating Sting...

Sting marked one of the highlights of Jazz à Vienne 2015 on July 8th. Before a sold-out Roman Theatre, the former leader of the Police demonstrated breath-taking musical eclecticism. From early pop to highly imaginative jazz and world music, he proved that he is indeed one of today's greatest showmen.

According to his birth certificate filed in the municipal registers of Wallsend, not far from Newcastle, Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner is preparing to celebrate his sixty-fourth birthday this October. This is undoubtedly true. However, the man who spent an hour and a half on stage at Vienna's Roman Theatre this Wednesday, July 8th, under the name Sting really doesn't seem to fit the image of a sixty-year-old, even in good shape. Certainly, he now presents himself with a face eaten away by an enormous Canadian lumberjack beard, but apart from this detail, the line, the musculature, the general appearance and the energy he exudes usually belong to well-groomed forty-somethings.
 

Sting, or "The Sting" in French, gave his audience exactly what they came for. He was treated to standards from The Police era, sprinkled throughout the concert with "Message in a Bottle," "Walking on the Moon," "So Lonely," "Doo Doo Doo, Dah Dah Dah," and "Roxanne" (what a standing ovation!), as well as the staples of his second period, topped by the song that will undoubtedly remain his masterpiece, "Englishman in New York." With the notable presence of saxophonist Branford Marsalis, this piece foreshadowed the jazzy Sting he is today, back in 1987.

For those who wondered what an artist like Sting could possibly be doing at a jazz festival, the answer is in his show. Alongside the brilliant pop of the years 78 to 83 of The Police period, after the romantic ballads of the following decades, Sting put both feet in jazz and the performance he gave in Vienna, playing the bass like the best in the discipline, swept away not only the "Stingmaniacs", but also the jazz aficionados present in the ancient theatre. 

Around Sting: a guitarist, a drummer (a near double of Stewart Copeland, who played the bass drums for The Police!), a backing singer, a violinist who also played the banjo, and a pianist. All exceptional. A small team in number, extraordinary in musical quality. We will not forget the musical dialogues between Sting's bass and the violin or the pianist's keyboard. Nor this image of the bassist surrounded by the violin and the guitar, a trio in full musical union in front of an audience delighted by the power of the sound they heard and the image of the joy of playing together that these peerless musicians reflected back to them. In an hour and a half, they retraced with Sting, a career of nearly forty years. Sting himself, with his well-known class and some remnants of his original rebellion, was able to recapture the enthusiasm of youth with "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic," and the emotion of the solitary singer with the very touching "Fragile." One of the highlights of the evening was also the performance of "Desert Rose," which he once recorded with Cheb Mami. Sting, with open arms to his audience and singing this magnificent song in Arabic, punctuated with "Yalla," will be hard to forget. 

Sting was there, the peroxide-blonde post-teenager of The Police, but Sting was also there, the romantic, tormented and disillusioned gentleman of "Englishman", and the committed Sting, dishevelled or bald head... and finally, another Sting present this evening in Vienna, the mature man, bearded and muscular, watched by age but certainly not by old age, having gone through classical music, by workers' songs and landing straight into jazz. They were all there in this mythical place, this ancient theatre of Vienna, one after the other and sometimes mixed, multiple facets of an artist who is like no other and who has not finished engraving his own furrow.

(c) France TVINFO by Jean-Francois Lixon