For Fans of Sting

When Sting walked away from The Police in 1985 to record with Branford Marsalis, Omar Hakim, and Darryl Jones, the critical consensus was that he had lost his mind. The Dream of the Blue Turtles proved otherwise. It was the album that established a template almost no rock musician had attempted: genuine jazz ensemble playing, real harmonic ambition, and a lyrical vocabulary drawn from Jungian psychology, Nabokov, and labor history. Thirty-plus years on it still sounds startling.

Before Sting became Sting the global pop star, he was a serious actor with an unsettling screen presence. Brimstone and Treacle, the 1982 Dennis Potter adaptation, cast him as a charming sociopath insinuating himself into a grieving household, and he was genuinely frightening. His role in Dune the same year and Quadrophenia before that showed real range. The acting career got eclipsed by the music, but the films hold up.

In 2006 Sting recorded an album of 16th-century lute songs by John Dowland with lutenist Edin Karamazov. It was not a novelty project. The arrangements were immaculate, Sting's voice suited the melancholy modal harmonies perfectly, and the album reached the top of the classical charts in several countries. It is the most direct evidence of how wide his genuine curiosity runs, and a gateway into early music for listeners who never knew they were interested.

Sting's 2013 concept album and subsequent Broadway musical drew directly on his Wallsend, Newcastle upbringing and the closure of the Swan Hunter shipyard. It was his most personal project in decades. The music was rooted in English folk and choral tradition, the characters were drawn from his own family, and the themes, economic loss and masculine identity and the meaning of skilled work, had genuine weight. The Broadway production was short-lived, but the album stands as one of his most coherent statements.