Bobby McFerrin:
An Improvised Life
Bobby McFerrin is more than the face of a catchy melody buttressed by an unforgettable slogan. An exercise in planned improvisation and incidental dynamism, his existence as a musician has been characterized by the habitual line stepping that has allowed him to stretch the sonic limitations of the listener by first breaking his own. A walking sound lab, Bobby McFerrin has spread himself across musical genres and technological platforms, from clinic to concert, to revisit and dissect the compositions that anchor the canon of your average symphony orchestra or languish on the list of standards that leave dirty old singles crumpled at the bottom of massive cognac glasses in piano bars tucked into side streets across the world; McFerrin has made it his business to force you to hear things differently. By doing so, it seems he may be forcing a culture obsessed with the disposable to consider the easily discarded, oft-ignored artifacts of past musical glory suddenly indispensable. Likely less interested in what you are listening to, than that you are listening and how your ears perceive the things you are hearing, McFerrin has graciously offered his four-octave vocal as the voice of change.
Son of the first black soloist at the Metropolitan Opera, Bobby McFerrin was born in New York City to singers Robert McFerrin Sr. and Sara Copper in 1950. His range a direct hybridization of nature and nurture, McFerrin expressed an interest in music at an early age. Beginning with clarinet, he moved to piano, and eventually to life as a vocalist after club hopping as a lounge pianist during the early part of his career. The iconography of McFerrin is of a chest-tapping percussive vocal talent with an ear-to-ear grin and a penchant for floating somewhere over the register on a band of high-notes that stretch from his mouth like pulled taffy. He, like his most famous tune, is a scion for the concept of happiness – logging regular performances with the Muppets could only have bolstered this position over the years. While that imagery remains a pillar of Bobby McFerrin’s career, it is an overly simplistic view of a man with an amazing vocal aptitude whose ten Grammy awards suggest his catalog and career are a bit more than the stuff of advertisers’ dreams.
Bobby McFerrin’s talent emerged with the formation of the Bobby Mack Quartet during his teens, an early foray that funneled itself into subsequent amateur gigs including a stint with the Ice Follies. McFerrin began to come into his own after spending the later portion of the ’70s playing in New Orleans with a group called Astral Project. During that time he met former vocalist, Linda Goldstein, who would produce and manage his career going forward. Playing on the idea of improvisation in live performance, they took their cue from Keith Jarrett’s penchant for completely improvised concerts to launch McFerrin’s career as a solo artist appearing at jazz festivals across the United States and Europe, where he was playing unaccompanied by the early ’80s. McFerrin released his first solo album, the self-titled Bobby McFerrin, in 1982. The album was met with critical acclaim and highlighted by a reinterpretation of Van Morrison’s “Moondance,” which goes from soul stirring deconstruction of a pop ballad to a master class in complete defense of the idea that McFerrin is criminally slept on as a jazz vocalist by the time you realize he is performing all of his own horn parts, including the solo whimpering and rushing across a nasal staccato that begins to suggest he might be toying with the egos of his contemporaries who may have thought themselves amazing before placing a needle against his recording.
By 1985, Bobby McFerrin had won his first Grammy for a performance of “A Night In Tunisia” with vocal powerhouse, Manhattan Transfer; his second and third Grammy Awards would be issued in the two years immediately following. Simple Pleasures, the vehicle for “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” would later win Album and Song of The Year in 1988, while the single reached the top of the pop charts across the globe. On the heels of major commercial success, however, McFerrin retreated to the confines of musical experimentation and immersed himself in orchestral study. His work would lead to a conducting debut with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra by 1990. This facilitated collaboration with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and a position as creative director of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra by the mid-90s. Since then, McFerrin has remained impassioned about life as an educator reliant upon the kind of sonic innovation and crowd participation that would surely melt the walls of your average old-line conservatory lecture hall playing home field for nothing but classical standards and hell for the mere suggestion of deviation.
Bobby McFerrin’s more recent work has included continued orchestral work as a conductor and accompanist, as well as a collaboration with arranger Robert Treece which produced 2010′s Vocabularies; the album is the result of a tedious effort on the part of Treece to recreate McFerrin’s vocal improvisations for multiple vocalists and musicians. The album stands as a triumphant return, equal parts homage and collaboration, produced over the course of eight years, which returns McFerrin to the fore in a way that somehow raises the bar on the standard of excellence and slight impossibility he had already set for potential competitors. McFerrin has also spent a good amount of time on the lecture circuit over the past few years, doing things like demonstrating the neural capacity of human beings to retain series of notes and participate in group improvisation based upon a basic understanding of the pentatonic scale; an accidental therapist working to expose the quirks and strange capabilities of the human mind. Further compounding the gravity of McFerrin’s musical legacy is the emergence of his son, Taylor McFerrin, who takes the birthright of vocal dexterity to even greater depths working as a solo artist layering his vocals into ridiculously impressive compositions driven almost entirely by beatbox percussion combined with vocal and instrumental melody. Father and son, distinguished by audible differences in generational and musical influences, are united by common lineage, musical talent, and the fact that they are deadly as a duet.
Whether he is scatting, stutter stepping his way through an exhalation of bass and snare fills, or standing squarely atop a whimsical moment moonlighting in soprano, Bobby McFerrin understands one fundamental thing that many people making music tend to miss; it is not the kind of equipment you have, but what you do with it. McFerrin uses his vocal ability to produce in mere minutes what the most expensive studio rigs and popular producers sometimes cannot, even after hours at work. His goal seems less to shame others and more to show anyone willing to learn that there is always more than one way to make great music. There is more than one kind of sound to make and more than one way to say a line. It does not matter whether or not you know the words or if there are words at all, Bobby McFerrin just wants everyone to be brave enough to sing along.
Words by Karas Lamb