STING

—

AFTER a concert like his Beacon Theatre show, it’s no wonder Sting ranks among the most misunderstood, loved and abused artists in music.

At the Tuesday opener of his four-night stand, the Englishman in New York came off as too brainy for pop, too soft for rock and too square for jazz.

But love him or not, Sting is a charismatic showman.

The tip-off that this wasn’t going to be your typical rock show was right up front in the first song when Sting, fronting a seven-piece ensemble, took center stage to work an atmospheric version of “Walking on the Moon” as he played a stand-up bass.

The instrumentation and the arrangement were clearly a nod to his pre-Police years as a hipster jazzman playing bass in smoky English clubs.

That finger-clicking Beat attitude and sound – the nuts and bolts of this gig – appealed to the older, very male audience.

Yet when they were applied to “Let’s Forget About the Future,” the song’s great syncopated funk-line fell victim to jazzy bop solos.

Where Sting’s jazz jones best satisfied the crowd was in his vocal, as he spat out lyrics more for sound than meaning. That was nicely demonstrated in the tune “Inside,” where he defined love in rapid-fire, rhyme-time lyrics that could have been a vocabulary flashcard exercise.

Sting and company were their strongest on the songs that toyed with the world music movement, like the pretty “Fragile.”

By the time he was toying with the crowd with sudden-stop false endings on “Every Breath You Take,” he was unmistakably a performer having a fine time, in total control of the music and the audience – despite all that jazz.