The historic encounter with Gil Evans

The worldwide success of the Police had turned Sting into a star in the pantheon of rock. At the peak of a trajectory that seemed like it might never end, internal tensions forced the band into a hiatus, leaving millions of fans stunned and bewildered. Sting wasted no time, immediately setting to work on the building blocks of a brilliant solo career. “The Dream Of The Blue Turtles” and the double live album “Bring On The Night” showcased the English musician's love of jazz and sophisticated arrangements. The following record, “...Nothing Like The Sun”, crowned him a pop messiah. Before that hugely anticipated and much-lauded second studio album came out, on 16 October 1987, Sting was celebrated in a historic concert broadcast live by Rai.

On 11 July 1987, Perugia's Stadio Renato Curi filled up beyond capacity. The famed orchestra of seventy-five-year-old composer Gil Evans hosted the thirty-five-year-old pop idol, Sting. The two musicians had met some time earlier at a London club, the celebrated Ronnie Scott's. Over the following two years, Sting had flown to New York to hear Evans play at Sweet Basil, and on one occasion had been invited to sing (“the club was so small there wasn't even room for me on stage. So I had to stay among the tables with the microphone,” Sting would later recall). It was Umbria Jazz's artistic director, Carlo Pagnotta, who wove together the plan to make the event happen.

A few preparatory meetings helped the two musicians settle on the concert's setlist: Jimi Hendrix's “Little Wing”, which Sting was recording at the time for his new album; Hendrix's “Up From The Skies”; Billie Holiday's “Strange Fruit”; a couple of Evans's own pieces; and a few more from Sting. Just two days of rehearsals in a secret location were enough to blend the English musician's guitar and voice with the sound of the Orchestra, which for the occasion featured an extraordinary lineup of musicians including saxophonists George Adams, John Surman and Chris Hunter, trombonists George Lewis and Tom Malone, bassist Mark Egan, drummer Danny Gottlieb, and, for the special occasion of the evening of 11 July, a guest appearance by saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who had by then been a regular fixture in Sting's studio and live bands for a couple of years.

Marco Molendini titled his piece in Il Messaggero thus: “Sting: the boss is Evans, I'm just the singer,” reporting what he'd heard the day before at the event's press conference, held at the Palazzo della Regione Umbria. The twenty-five thousand people at the Curi clearly felt otherwise: Sting, in a white t-shirt under a black suit with his Gibson slung over his shoulder, thanked them repeatedly between songs, in Italian. Pleased that his fans were following him even on a night when jazz set the pace. That much was clear from the very first notes of the opening track, “Bud & Bird”, taken from Evans's album of the same name. After more than an hour and a half, the Orchestra left the stage and Sting bid farewell to the crowd with a voice-and-guitar-only version of “Message In A Bottle”, sung by the entire stadium. It seemed like the start of a fruitful collaboration that, however, would never come to be: Gil Evans died of peritonitis just a few months later, in Mexico.

No official recordings of the event exist, only bootlegs, decent in quality but with a partial setlist. Fortunately, the full concert is up on YouTube, letting those who weren't there experience the night Sting set Umbria Jazz alight: we present it to you below.

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16/03/2026