Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Indian Sumner

If this review is any indication, they really love Sting in India:

Yet, the absolute highlights of the night were two tracks made marvelously long with fabulous improvisations. Never coming home, a new track, explores the story of a disillusioned girl leaving her lover, and traverses three different perspectives while at it. Here, the song also aptly rammed through a gazillion musical styles, as pianist Jason Rebello hammered honky-tonk and blues with equal panache, and percussionist Rhani Krija went wild on the skins. The song stretched beyond ten minutes, in a utopian jazz-based frenzy, where Sting again grabbed the spotlight, and not because of his vocals. As a bass guitarist, Sting is in the absolute elite, like Paul McCartney and Bill Wyman, and here he let loose, bigtime, his face strained with glorious effort as the bass guitar flew ethereally in the throes of delicious insanity. And we stood there gaping, in a semi-faint, thankful to be witnessing genius in action.

Then, without much ado, he plunked the most famous G minor chord in history. The audience yelled madly. Ladies and gents, we stood a few feet away from Sting and his band bathed in red light, embarking on a song quite simply titled Roxanne.

Great insanity, pure and unadulterated, swept overwhelmingly across the grounds, as the performers again thwacked the song into orbit, Kipper's tambourine firmly placing the mythic track firmly into pure chaos. Again, Sting the bassist treated us to an exquisite solo, stealing – momentarily – the thunder from Sting the vocalist, and his awesome impromptu takes on words engraved forever in our collective consciousness.

We never wanted the night to end, but when singing along to the fabulous Every breath you take, the fadeout was imminent. The crowds began to deal with the loss, with the fact that the evening was winding up. The track, Sting's most successful single from The Police's last album, Synchronicity, is a fantastic song, one of the most 'perfect' singles ever crafted, an instantly-appealing classic often misunderstood as a love song, but an actually dark and macabre ditty about an obsessive stalker.
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The review goes on like this. As you may have guessed, the main reason I linked to this article was so I could use the title "Indian Sumner." Speaking of which, here is the menu for a restaurant of that name. Delhi-cious!

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