Barb Jungr & John McDaniel - Float Like A Butterfly: The Songs Of Sting (2018)

In her introduction Barb Jungr has pointed out the hurdles of interpreting a singer-songwriter of near legendary status such as Sting who comes with all the trappings of such fame.

It has, she suggested, made some folk recoil at the mention of his name even before getting to the essence of what the man is all about.

Interpreting and adapting Sting’s songs for herself and her pianist John McDaniel throws up a number of challenges not least how to re-configure songs where the backings by the groups in the original recordings are regarded as an essential part of the package.

The 18 songs in this programme cross the decades, the most recent being ‘August Winds’ from the short-lived Broadway musical The Last Ship in 2014 (opening in Newcastle on 12 March 2018, followed by a major UK and Ireland tour.).

The hits are here but a number of the lesser-known songs suggest that Jungr has paid careful attention to all the texts, stripping each one down to the bare essentials and singing them with an insight and a rawness and emotional energy that she can truly call her own.

Jungr can do fun too, her harmonica interpolations being a joy in their own right. ‘Russians’, a polemic against US/Russian foreign policy of the mid 1980s, is launched on the piano with Prokofiev’s ‘Entry of the Montagues and Capulets’, is a rousing anthem in her hands, as is ‘Fortress Around My Heart’.

She lends ‘Every Little Thing He Does Is Magic’ a catchy bounce in contrast to the gentle sway of the tune and accompaniment in her interpretation of ‘An Englishman in New York’, so apt for the figure of Quentin Crisp.

I loved her evocation of ‘Fields of Gold’, inspired it seems by a pastoral scene viewed from a window in Sting’s Wiltshire house, and in similar vein, ‘Fragile’, a song addressing green issues, prefaced by her poetic description of walking on her beloved Isle of Skye.

Her linking narrative is pithy and sometimes unexpected as in her tale of Hogarthian shenanigans in a gentleman’s club in St James’ where she applied for her first job in London in 1975.

She also gives us a little insight into the problems lyrics, as in ‘Desert Rose’, can present to a singer instancing a trait in Sting’s lexicon whereby he’ll alter just one word in a line making it “hideous to learn”.

The pianist McDaniel is the accompanist and arranger of the songs, a consummate professional, who is at ease whether singing solo, joining in harmony on the refrains, or adding a few words of his own to the links between the songs.

One senses a rare rapport between the two of them and a fervent wish from the audience that they will return before too long. ~Adrian Edwards