McFerrin, Bobby

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BOBBY McFERRIN

Born: New York, New York, 11 March 1950

Genre: Jazz, Classical

Best-selling album since 1990: Circlesongs (1997)

Bobby McFerrin uses his entire body and more voice than most singers when he improvises with vocalists and instrumentalists of diverse genres. The son of opera singers Sara and Robert McFerrin, Sr. (the first African-American male soloist at the Metropolitan Opera), McFerrin had piano lessons, played clarinet, and took music preparatory classes at the Juilliard School as a child. He cites Gershwin, Bach, Puccini, Verdi, Joe Williams, and Count Basie as his "first loves." He studied piano, composition, and orchestration at Sacramento State University and Cerritos College, where the pianist and soundtrack composer Dave Grusin was one of his teachers. As a teenager he formed a high school quartet that had a nationwide tour with the Ice Follies, and he played piano in a lounge band. McFerrin was especially drawn to Miles Davis's jazz-fusion breakthrough album Bitches Brew (1969), and he was fascinated by pianist Keith Jarrett's performances of lengthy concerts without prepared music. Yet McFerrin resisted committing to a musical career until he was twenty-seven years old, when, "during a period of intense inner searching about my creative self," he recalls hearing "not a thunderbolt, just a still, small voice saying 'You are a singer.'"

In 1978 McFerrin joined the New Orleans fusion band Astral Project and toured with the singer/lyricist Jon Hendricks. He won acclaim and notice for performances at the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl in 1980 and the Kool Jazz Festival in New York in 1981. In 1982 he performed at the Kool festival on a program introducing a generation of "young lions," including Wynton Marsalis and more than a dozen other emerging talents, recorded by Elektra/Musician. In 1983 McFerrin toured Europe as an unaccompanied vocalist using no prepared material, as documented on The Voice (1984).

McFerrin continues to refine his solo practice. He thumps his chest or stamps his feet for percussion and begins a wordless melody or a mid-register phrase from a Beatles' tune, a Bach invention, a bebop theme, The Wizard of Oz, or a kindergarten ditty such as "Itsy Bitsy Spider." He alters the timbral qualities of selected syllables by manipulating his throat, tongue, cheeks, teeth, and nasal passages. Simultaneously he summons pure high head tones as grace notes and dips into tenor, baritone, and/or bass registers until he is a split personality singing like a street corner choir or a persuasive imitation of a conventional jazz ensemble.

McFerrin also pursues creative collaborations. In 1986 he won two Grammys: for his complex vocal chart and performance of "Another Night in Tunisia" with the vocal quartet Manhattan Transfer on his album Spontaneous Inventions (1986), and for his duet with the pianist Herbie Hancock on the film soundtrack 'Round Midnight (1986). He won a Best Recording for Children Grammy for The Elephant's Child (1987).

McFerrin's greatest fame and fortune arose from his reggae-inflected, multitracked single "Don't Worry, Be Happy," from Simple Pleasures (1988), which also includes layered one-man-band renditions of songs by 1960s rock bands. The track won 1988 Grammys for Song of the Year, New Song of the Year, and Best Pop Male Vocal, and it was adopted by George H.W. Bush's campaign in the 1992 presidential contest against Bill Clinton, although it was later withdrawn at McFerrin's request.

Overwhelmed by continuous touring and publicity demands, McFerrin suspended performing to study conducting with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. On his fortieth birthday in 1990 he led the San Francisco Symphony. He won a 1992 Grammy for a second rendition of the jazz classic "'Round Midnight" with pianist Chick Corea and mixed his original compositions with classical works in a duet program with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma on Hush (1992). In 1994 McFerrin was appointed music director of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, with which he runs a music education program; the album Paper Music (1995) is his conducting debut with that ensemble. The Mozart Sessions (1996) features Corea and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.

McFerrin directs Voicestra, a fourteen-piece improvising choir heard on Medicine Music (1990) and Circlesongs (1997); Hard Chorale, a quartet; and a jazz group, Bang! Zoom. He is largely unconcerned with genre distinctions and believes that anyone can make music with the voice. In concert McFerrin typically directs sections of the audience in ostinato patterns against and over which he and amateur volunteers perform solo. Although he may want to deny the uniqueness of his musical gifts, McFerrin is one of a kind.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

The Voice (Elektra, 1982); Spontaneous Inventions (Blue Note, 1986); The Elephant's Child (Windham Hill, 1987); Simple Pleasures (EMI, 1988); The Best of Bobby McFerrin (Blue Note, 1990); Medicine Music (EMI, 1990); Hush (Columbia, 1992); Play (1992); Bang! Zoom (Blue Note, 1995); The Mozart Sessions (Sony, 1996); Circlesongs (1997); Beyond Words (Blue Note, 2002).