The bassist Sting said was out of everyone’s league: “He totally recalibrated what it was to be a bass player”
(Credits: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Sat 10 January 2026 9:44, UK
When the Police first started gaining traction, Sting was bound to have his hands full with every single song.
It’s one thing to be the one weaving together all the melodies whenever you walk into the studio, but having to anchor down the rhythm section on bass was bound to be a bit more difficult when you’re trying to keep up with a madman like Stewart Copeland. But Sting was already a professional, and he wasn’t afraid to show the rest of the world that he did his musical homework based on the people he worked with.
First of all, it was already insane for that much noise to come out of three people across their records. A lot of Sting’s handiwork came from the melodies that connect tunes like ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ or ‘Message in a Bottle’, but it’s about the way that the rest of the band attacked it that made an impact. ‘Every Breath You Take’ and ‘Walking on the Moon’ wouldn’t have sounded the same with those massive chordal landscapes that Andy Summers created, but by the time Synchronicity was winding down, Sting wanted some more people to play with.
And Dream of the Blue Turtles saw him pull out all the stops that he could. It was one thing to get a solo band to help him perform a handful of tunes, but the fact that his contemporaries were members of the jazz world, he was definitely looking for something more than a few pop hits. He was following the lead of people like Joni Mitchell by venturing into new territories, but there was never going to be any line that he played that could come anywhere near the level of Jaco Pastorius.
Having already done work with Mitchell, Pastorius’s touch on the bass guitar is still the benchmark for what everyone should try to do on the four-string. Jimi Hendrix may have worked his magic when playing electric guitar, but through his use of harmonics and knowledge of every single scale that you could think of, Pastorius was using the bass as a tool for creative expression more than a musical instrument, especially when playing beautiful pieces like ‘Continuum’.
Sting could definitely get a few of those lines under his fingers, but no matter how much he practised a song like ‘Teen Town’, he was convinced no one could reach what Pastorius was doing, saying, “When Jaco came, about that time, he totally recalibrated what it was to be a bass player. He could play Charlie Parker chromatic lines on the bass guitar: nobody had thought of that before. I’d love to know what he’d be doing now, if he survived his problems. It would have been remarkable.”
But that’s also part of the reason why Pastorius has been so mythologised. The fact that someone had that much creative expression in their soul is almost unthinkable now, but seeing him throw his all into nearly anything he played is something that everyone should strive to do, even if it means getting their hands dirty by trying to copy every single lick from ‘Donna Lee’ or ‘Come On Come Over’.
And it’s not like you can’t hear some of the influence in the way that Sting plays as well. Not every single Police bassline needed to have that kind of fusion influence, but if you listen to the way that the bass sits in the mix of ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’, the way that he’s playing harmonics feels like it’s taken directly from the days when Pastorius was trying out different things on the bass and finding new avenues that hadn’t been explored on the bass.
There’s never any way for people to outright copy what Pastorius did, but maybe that’s actually a good thing. Because for all of the beauty that he gave us while he was alive, what we have is a guidebook to what can be done on the bass. So, really, Sting was only one in a long line of bassists that got to see the musical genius of Pastorius and put their own spin on it. It was a daunting standard to live up to, but not many bassists were able to back up Pastorius’s claim when he called himself the greatest bass player in the world.
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