Summers photos By Rogier Van Bakel
"That's pretty odious," Andy Summers says to me. "An odious comparison." His blueish eyes darken. Roughly an hour into our 90-minute face-to-face interview, I'd asked if it bothers him that in terms of reach and staying power, his solo oeuvre will never match his work with The Police.
To me, the observation seemed factual and uncontroversial, like saying that the sun rises in the east. The Police sold more than 75 million records and played some of the largest venues in the world. The night before our interview, I'd watched Summers perform a show in a 400-seat theater in rural Waldoboro, Maine.
But my conversation partner feels I've belittled him and impugned his post-Police career. He looks irascibly out the plate-glass window into the rain-splashed courtyard of his hotel in Portland. No slight was intended, I tell him, and I apologize if my Dutch directness came across as a lack of manners. He softens. "Yeah, you do look Dutch, actually," he says, sizing me up before launching into a brief ode to Amsterdam.
A curtain of spaceIt's a fair distinction, and a vital one. Punk's overconfident idea was that you could buy a guitar on Monday and play your first gig on Friday. By contrast, Sting had honed his chops in the jazz fusion band Last Exit; drummer Stewart Copeland had cut his teeth in the progressive-rock and folk group Curved Air; and Summers, who'd studied the classical guitar extensively, played with everyone from the Animals to Kevin Ayers, from Joan Armatrading to Soft Machine. It was painful to him that the Police could only survive in late-'70s London by being, as he puts it, "fake punks." Not that the cosplaying fooled anyone. Even the band's own manager, Miles Copeland, despaired that Summers was an ersatz punk after he'd gone on stage "wearing trousers that were maybe half an inch wider than what punk fashion dictated," the guitarist recounts with a laugh. Sartorial choices mattered, but in the end the music mattered more, and the Police got tighter and more polished by the week. In the months leading up to their first album, the band began to slyly incorporate jazz and reggae while holding on to a punkish energy. A key characteristic of those genres is that there's often a good deal of space between the notes. The Police reminded themselves that what you don't play is as important as what you do play. Sting had learned that sparseness from listening to Miles Davis; Summers, also a Miles Davis fan, was especially influenced by Thelonious Monk. (He would later record 13 Monk compositions for his album Green Chimneys.) "It was like a mantra we had up on the wall—less is more," Summers recalls. "We were very conscious of the fact that when you've only got three instruments, you can make them all sound bigger. The minute you start overloading the songs with overdubs and all that—you know, 19 fucking guitars—it gets to be too much. What worked for us was that clear, clean sound."
The band finally began making magic when Stewart Copeland turned the rhythms inside out, finding infectious backbeats that groove-locked with the syncopations of Sting's 1954 Fender Precision bass. Summers, for his part, shunned barre chords and solos. While his peers in other bands were riffing hard and rolling out the same old pentatonic scales, he played arpeggiated chords most rock guitarists could barely name—added 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths, suspended 2nds, and more. By also avoiding root-position triads and incorporating open-string drones, Summers often gave his parts a shimmering quality. Quartal chords (built on fourths instead of thirds), polychords (footnote 3), and wide-interval voicings became his trademarks. Sometimes he used inversions that placed the fifth or seventh of a chord in the bass, creating tension and unexpected harmonic movement.
For the finishing touch, Summers employed guitar effects in unique ways. Around the time he joined the Police, he found an old Echoplex and was immediately smitten. "I used it all the time," he says. "It has a quarter-inch tape that spools around a couple of tape heads. You can vary the number of repeats with a slider. It gave my guitar parts this rich harmonic wash, a spatial quality that helped define our sound."
Chet Atkins, Miles Davis, and Brian May had all used Echoplexes before Summers did, but not with the same fondness for manipulating the device's rhythmic powers. "I found that I could play a rhythm and eighth notes against the drums and create 16th-note patterns," Summers says. In One Train Later, his engaging autobiography, he explains that he then often colored his playing with "dissonant harmonies and accented syncopation, [resulting] in a guitar sound that becomes huge and prismatic, like a rainbow arcing over the band." The use of the device, he says, was "seminal in changing and pushing the group into a unique direction, creating a curtain of space."
He's still enthused by the possibilities of electronic enhancements, as evidenced by the fresh sounds on solo albums like 2015's Metal Dog and 2017's Triboluminescence (a word the dictionary defines as "the emission of light caused by rubbing, scratching, or similar frictional contact"—not a bad description of some of Summers's music). His latest album, Vertiginous Canyons, is based in large part on sounds he discovered while playing around with studio effects. "When you're not doing pop songs with vocals, you're released from traditional song structures," Summers says. "You can then build other types of songs, and I often do. Purely sonic stuff, you know? It doesn't have to make any effort toward song structure." When he's playing with effects, he may hit upon strange, ambient guitar sounds and intriguing textures.
Footnote 1: See yahoo.com/topics/andy-summers. Footnote 2: See punk77.co.uk/spitting-and-gobbing. Footnote 3: Watch this fascinating analysis of Summers's guitar part on "Message in a Bottle": tinyurl.com/y7vvzym2.
