Andy Summers discusses multimedia solo show headed here, and a few Police memories

GREENSBURG ― Andy Summers provided the brilliant guitar riffage to superstar rock band The Police, and now he's out on the road alone, performing a multi-dimensional concert headed our way.

"I've spent my life on the stage. I enjoy being on the stage. But this is a little bit different," Summers said in a late September phone interview. "It's completely solo, so it's down to whatever resources I have (laughs). It's a multimedia show because I play to a full-size cinema screen showing many different sequences of photography from all over the world that I put together to different kinds of music."

"So, it's fairly exotic. Some of it's out there. I also play to that mix a few Police hits I do very exotically also," Summers said. "And it's a lot of talking and stories. It's a full-on multimedia event that's gone down extremely well."

Police hits like "Roxanne," "Spirits in The Material World," and "Message in a Bottle" have turned up in the setlist of a tour that includes visits to The Egg in Albany, N.Y. on Oct. 11; Appell Center For The Performing Arts in York, Pa. on Oct. 12; Patchogue Theatre in New York on Oct. 14 and the Palace Theatre in Greensburg on Oct. 17.

Fans can expect The Police's "Tea in The Sahara" accompanied to photographs Summers took on a visit to that desert and Morocco.

"It's not just me playing 'Tea in the Sahara,' because I went to the Sahara and have a whole story behind it and I filmed and photographed it and it's a bit of a preamble on stage with me setting it up and they all enjoy listening to. It's pretty funny stuff."

His solo composition "The Bones of Twang Zu" accompanies photo images from China published in one of his eight photography books showcasing Summers' worldwide travels and the interesting people and cultures he saw. For that song, he uses a special harmonizer effects machine "with the idea it needed a fairly exotic sound that would go with this strangeness and surrealism" of the photos. "Something very atmospheric that's very compelling to look at with this sort of strange but beautiful music."

Summers' photography books, available at his merch table, regularly sell out. His most recent art book, "A Series of Glances," features emotional black and white photos presented with the craft and forethought of a concert setlist. Photos range from a Mexican street party, to a jovially leaping young monk; and a circus acrobat, a Peruvian mountain villager and a presumably naked woman gazing at the album cover of the "This Is Elvis" soundtrack.

As a photographer, Summers started in black and white, influenced by the European art house films of Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godart and Francois Truffaut he devoured in his early-to-mid teens.

"At that very receptive age, when your emotions are all over the place, I took all those films in and it was very important to me because it also showed me the world at large outside of my own little town," Summers said. "Among all this sophisticated stuff was all this beautiful imagery in black and white. Later, when I started photographing, and realized I was self-committing to photography that it was something I was going to do, it seemed to me if I was going to be serious doing it for the reasons that were already pushing me, it would be black and white."

He was a movie buff as a teen, though he dreamed of becoming a jazz guitarist.

That dream forged his destiny, especially after he met a like-minded English musician named Gordon Sumner, who'd become known to the world as the singer Sting, along with a virtuoso drummer named Stewart Copeland. As The Police they sold a staggering number of records, won Grammy Awards and thrilled sold-out venues around the globe.

Summers' innovative guitar playing − both sophisticated and economical − earned wide acclaim and influenced many.

"You have to bring it into a wider context. I was in this band, a very special, world-beating, unique band," Summers said. "It could only be the three of us. There was no way that band could have existed otherwise. I was very much into my guitar-playing style in the band, thinking about guitar all the time. I'm noted for the way I voice the harmonies. The kind of backings I did, too," Summers said. "Essentially in that band I'm the lead guitarist, but I'm surrounding the singer with all kinds of stuff. It's like, 'How can I make this singer sound great and keep the sound changing?' So, I was always looking for not only sonic ways, with say guitar pedals which I was pretty into at that time, but also the kind of chords I played.

"When I was growing up, I wanted to be a jazz guitarist, that was what really got me off," Summers said. "I got into Miles Davis, John Coltrane and people like Kenny Burrell and Jimmy Raney; these were my favorites, what my head was full of. But then I also studied classical guitar for years. I had a lot of music in my fingers before I got to the Police. Lucky part was Sting was coming out of a jazz-rock unit also, and also was interested in classical guitar, and we both loved Brazilian music, so it was a real meeting of the minds. The one good thing, which was sort of a snag, is we had to be a rock band, and we had to be a punk band and somehow, we sort of cheated our musical predilections into a rock band and sort of making it into a rock style. And Stewart was doing his high-hat thing and that was how the unique chemistry of The Police came out."

Credit Summers for saving one of The Police's most epic hits, "Every Breath You Take," after he introduced his bandmates to what Guitar World later hailed as an "iconic, oft-sampled riff that perfectly balanced the tender and sinister qualities of the song."

Recalls Summers: "The song was going to go into the trash until Sting said, 'Go on, make it your own' and I immediately played that, and it went straight to No. 1 and now passed 1 billion and a half hits on Spotify."

At his January concert with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Sting reminisced how "Roxanne" was inspired by a movie poster he saw in a not-so-glamorous Paris hotel where the Police stayed on an early tour.

For Summers, "Roxanne" stirs up memories of his car that broke down on that same Paris tour stop, a story he's told in his solo concerts.

"We got sort of stranded in Paris. Stewart and I were lucky, we got bailed out by a German conductor and he paid for us to have a nice time and come to Germany to play with him, and Sting got the job of trying to drive what's called a Dyane 6 (a French car) back to England where you could not take your foot off the accelerator, even when he was on the boat because the engine died. I don't know if I ever saw it again," Summers said. "Fragile circumstances."

Summers is an accomplished fiction writer, too, penning two books including a short story compilation, "Fretted and Moaning," where there's always one guitar-playing character. His steamy, cinematic tale "The Lotus Position," for instance, centers on a woman having an affair with her worldly yoga instructor, as she seeks an escape from her unfulfilled marriage to a wannabe rock guitarist devoted more to his failed efforts to master his instrument.

Summers' manager suggested he read a bit of his prose during concerts.

"I'm still sort of on the edge about it," Summers said, explaining he's dabbled in the idea. "I might try it on this next run actually. Yeah, 'The Lotus Position' would be a good one. Here's the reality though. Think about it: You've got a huge wooden podium; you feel like you're a vicar or something. I'm not a big guy but I can really look over this thing. so, I thought 'Well I'm not doing that; it's old style and it's physically limited.' Then my sister gave me this giant iPad and it was so heavy and I said, 'I can't do that, it's weighing me down.' And then if you hold the actual physical book and you've got stage lights, it's difficult to read. So, I haven't actually cracked that one yet and I've not really memorized the stories completely."

Still, he does chat with his concert audiences.

"I'm very good at it," he said. "I never get stymied by talking into a mic, that's just something that comes natural to me. I have three fairly long anecdotes and they were all in my autobiographical book, so I do those," he said.

It's fair to ask a storyteller his most vivid memory of visiting Pittsburgh or central Pennsylvania.

"I remember Pittsburgh very well. I know Pittsburgh is a great place to photograph all that old industrial stuff. Over the years I did actually feature photos of Pittsburgh," he said.

"And I'll tell you a funny story, just to finish up about Pittsburgh," Summers said. "When we were starting out, maybe the second tour where we came to The States from England and we had a gig in Pittsburgh and we thought, 'Aw, God, Pittsburgh, what's that going to be like?' We played in some small club then we went out and I was with Sting and we thought these girls were really coming onto us, like there's something going on and we couldn't quite figure it out and they were dressed up real sexy and we're thinking, 'God is this America? Wow, these chicks are like weird.' Finally, we caught on that it was Halloween night. Hilarious. We had to laugh."

Scott Tady is entertainment editor at The Beaver County Times and easy to reach at stady@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Andy Summers discusses multimedia solo tour, and a few Police memories