Last night in a rare seated show at the Brooklyn Paramount, it was a great first time seeing Sting, closing out a 3-night sold-out NYC stand with his Sting 3.0 trio featuring longtime collaborator Dominic Miller (World Party, Pretenders) on guitar and backing vocals & Chris Maas (Maggie Rogers) on drums, a back-to-basics theater tour with a 23-song set that was split between still-resonant smash hits from his breakthrough reggae/jazz/punk-flavored trio The Police, later popular solo singles & deep cuts, and a new blues rock song “I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart).”
At 73, the wiry Sting is remarkably ageless in voice and body, and his affecting baritone-to-tenor rage and energetic melodic bass figures had the somewhat-less-gracefully-aged crowd standing and singing along almost the whole time, but true to his early pre-Police years playing jazz, he brought an improvisational flair to nearly every one of his very familiar songs, deftly sprinkling in subtle rhythmic shifts, interpolations, and call-and-response breaks with sharp synchronicity from Miller and Maas, offering pleasant surprises to even the most devoted fans on classic rock radio staples “Roxanne,” “Message in a Bottle,” “Every Breath You Take,” and more.
Besides the evergreen Police hits, it was especially welcome to hear the 1985 debut LP Dream of Blue Turtles’ fave “Fortress Around Your Heart” sprung on Sting as a non-setlist request from his “archivist” Miller and Sting’s nimble classical guitar playing on the closing “Fragile.”
The Sting 3.0 tour continues in the U.S. through November and in South America & Europe in 2025, it’s definitely worth catching.
Setlist:
Message in a Bottle (The Police song)
If I Ever Lose My Faith in You
Englishman in New York
Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic (The Police song)
Fields of Gold
Never Coming Home
Mad About You
Seven Days (Brief interpolation of Every Little Thing She Does is Magic)
Why Should I Cry for You?
All This Time
I Burn for You
Driven to Tears (The Police song)
Fortress Around Your Heart
Can’t Stand Losing You / Reggatta de Blanc (The Police song)
Shape of My Heart
I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart)
Walking on the Moon (The Police song)
So Lonely (The Police song)
Desert Rose
King of Pain (The Police song)
Every Breath You Take (The Police song)
Encore:
Roxanne (The Police song) (interpolation of Be Still My Beating Heart)
Fragile
Before Sting 3.0, the shuffling-in-crowd got an alert that pianist ELew (AKA Eric Lewis was going to be a special experience when a turtleneck-sweater-clad Sting walked out to share how he met ELew a few months back in a downtown Manhattan club after hearing him playing a combination of pop/classical/jazz music that “blew him away” and immediately invited him to open for his Sting 3.0 tour.
Then the suited, Afro-haired ELew approached the grand piano and gave a master class in what he calls RockJazz (transforming pop standards into improvisational jazz, including “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “(Theme from) New York, New York”) and CounterBop (classical counterpoint meets bebop jazz). These fluid musical adventures simultaneously layer cascading genres sprinkled with familiar quotes, as he crouches in a standing start in front of the keyboard like a musical cowboy taming a bucking bronco of sound, truly maximizing the pianoforte’s quiet/loud nature with fleet fingers and under-the-hood string plucking and strumming. Throughout each piece, he had the vibe of a mad scientist in a blissful musical fugue state, his expressionistic face acting out the twists & turns of the compositions, his head bobbing to the beat while mouthing notes & lyrics to the melodies, and his sudden spontaneous grinning that gave the impression that he is as delighted and surprised by the unexpected twists and turns of his musical experimentation as anyone.
ELew introduced most songs with charming anecdotes to give the context to his journey from growing up in Camden, NJ to learning to play jazz in Philly to a full-scholarship to Manhattan School of Music and later recordings with Wynton Marsalis, bursting with excitement to be performing on the same stage once graced by Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, and Duke Ellington, a club of legends with whom ELew’s phenomenal talent belongs.
Heartbeats (The Knife cover)
The Diary of Jane (Breaking Benjamin cover)
Oleo (Sonny Rollins cover)
Delfeayo’s Dilemma (Wynton Marsalis cover)
Puerto Rico
Thanksgiving / (Theme from) New York, New York (Frank Sinatra cover of a John Kander & Fred Ebb song)
Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana cover)
