Bees In The Garden

Sting

At the Boston Garden

February 5

IMAGINE hearing fine musicians in a spontaneous, freewheeling style. Imagine having an electric personality and Grammy award winner behind the microphone.

Now imagine all this in front of a Boston Garden crowd. Such was Sting's only area concert appearance for his ...Nothing Like the Sun tour.

The band, led by percussionists Mino Cinelu and Marvin Smith, ascended the stage one by one and began to play their instruments to build the sound, as in Stop Making Sense, until Sting himself took the stage for an extended mix of "The Lazarus Heart/Too Much Information."

The first 40 minutes of the show were devoted exclusively to songs from ...Nothing like the Sun, which were punctuated by Branford Marsalis' hot saxophone on "Sister Moon" and Sting's soliloquy about bad American tea and whether the Boston Tea Party had anything to do with it.

Then, finally, older material popped up. The band launched into the old Police tune "One World," which has become an anthem of sorts. But musically, the song took on some newer textures than on its Ghost in the Machine version. The song started off in reggae, changing keys as the song progressed. Then the music accelerated to breakneck speed, slowing down only for the "they may seem a million miles away" coda. It was a radical departure from the tune's previous arrangements.

And to close the first musical set the band gave a performance of "Bring On The Night/When The World Is Running Down, You Make The Best of What's Still Around," complete with a three-minute solo by keyboardist Kenny Kirkland.

STING continued joining two songs together or remixing old tunes especially for concerts. But at times during the one-hour, 17-minute first set, the band was content to reproduce the new album's sound on stage instead of surpassing it.

That, however, was more than made up for in the second set. It started with an 11-minute rendition of the protest song "They Dance Alone." Then the band launched into Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing," a song which got the band a standing ovation on Saturday Night Live. The inevitable Hendrix-style guitar solo chore went to Jeff Campbell, who seemed to handle the duty tastefully, as he played a tribute to Hendrix rather than a carbon copy.

Highlights of the two encores included a banner-shaking rendition of "Don't Stand So Close To Me '86" and, on a quieter note, another acoustic Police song, "Message In A Bottle."

ASIDE from Prince, Sting may well have collected the finest set of backup musicians in popular music. From his past tour he has retained Kirkland, Marsalis and background singer Dolette McDonald. But some of the new personnel he has assembled this time makes the band more versatile than ever.

Smith and Cinelu anchor a dynamic rhythm section which literally picks up the band and moves it along. But Cinelu is a born show-stopper. He not only played over a dozen percussion instruments, but he warmed up the crowd with a conga solo, and gave a virtuoso performance on the udu, an instrument which resembles a jar. Keyboardist Delmar Brown complements Kirkland's jazz piano with a funky Caribbean sound. Campbell was simply electric, and Marsalis was, well, just Marsalis, which means excellent.

And Sting. Several years ago he said that he hated to play the guitar and that he was much more of a jazz bass player. But he has done "Roxanne" and "Message In A Bottle" on the acoustic guitar for years ever since the Secret Policeman's Other Ball recordings appeared.

Now he has become a virtuoso performer on keyboards as well as on guitar, as "Fragile" was a musical highlight. Even when he even made a mistake in one measure, he built the next sequence of notes around the errant sound.

This was just one example of the powers of improvisation the band as a whole possesses. When Sting and company are at their best, they don't just play music, they create it.