San Francisco Classical Voice: Bobby McFerrin’s Spirited Call to Sing Out 4/13/10 3:03 PM

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Bobby McFerrin’s Spirited Call to Sing

Out
BY KWAMI COLEMAN (/AUTHOR/KWAMI-COLEMAN)

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Bobby McFerrin is one of the few certified, international crowd-pleasers

alive today. His effect on San Francisco on Saturday night was no
exception; the audience at the Nob Hill Masonic Center had to be warned
by McFerrin himself, after almost two uninterrupted hours of singing, that
the stagehand union reps would come in and start arresting people if
folks didn’t start to leave. To be fair, though, McFerrin’s quip was a fitting
way to end an evening of spirited, improvised vocal performance that
included all members present, not to mention two steadfast and resolved
audience members who volunteered for McFerrin’s open call for a duet.
There were also, as might be expected from such an ebullient performer,
countless unsuspecting victims of impromptu collaboration, each of whom
seemed shocked that they could actually come up with something on the
spot.
Bobby McFerrin McFerrin wasn’t surprised, though. To improvise, he advised in the few
final moments before the authorities were supposed to crash in through
the doors, is to be present with your musical ideas and have them follow each other fluidly, in constant
motion. Based on the way he pivoted between musical genres and vocal technique, between the stage
and down the aisles of the hall into the very faces of concertgoers, McFerrin embodies that fluidity, and
led the audience into believing that they could be just as fluid themselves.

Yet a substantial part of McFerrin’s infectious charm is his acute sensitivity to the versatility and
expressive power of the human voice, which is the impetus behind his latest studio release,
VOCAbuLarieS . Saturday’s concert, produced by SFJAZZ, marked the premiere of the album’s material —
original compositions that seem to borrow elements from music from around the world, arranged by
McFerrin’s longtime collaborator, bassist Roger Treece, for a chorus of more than 30 singers. For the
album, Treece essentially isolated and expanded on distinct motifs in McFerrin’s vocal improvisations,
which he gathered over the course of his relationship with the singer that began as a member of
McFerrin’s Voicestra ensemble, founded in 1989. These motifs were then developed into varying,
undulating textures that serve as the relatively fixed and stable backdrop basis for McFerrin’s
improvisation.

In performance, however, even the backdrop is mutable. McFerrin, along with Treece, who assumed the
role of conductor for Saturday’s concert, regularly introduced new motifs to the various segments of the
Pacific Mozart Ensemble, the first-rank, Bay Area–based chorus that served as the ripieno (or full
ensemble) to McFerrin’s soloistic flights. The textural amalgam was dense and at some points hard to
latch onto, due partially to the indistinguishable languages hocketed between the choral voices, though
the overall effect was stimulating.

Power in Collective Expression

The most engaging moments were those when the audience was invited to join in, which seemed to
reinforce not only the vocal texture but also the intrinsic power of collective performance and
expression that was on display on stage. McFerrin’s message behind VOCAbuLarieS, apparently a
tongue-in-cheek one, seems to be the simple observation that every person is endowed with a voice
and, thus, the ability to use that voice for the purposes of personal expression. The next logical
observation is that a collection of voices means collective expression, thus magnifying that potential.
The final point McFerrin seems to make with VOCAbuLarieS is perhaps the simplest of all: What reason
do we have to not sing together more often?

McFerrin’s voice was singular, even in a choral texture, and, when unaccompanied, it nevertheless filled
the hall beautifully. Truly a virtuoso, McFerrin has created a sound that is robust and tender,
commanding and intimate, electrifying and soulful, and he loves to see what he can do with it. Among
the others who also got a kick out of everything McFerrin can actually do was the versatile percussionist
Alex Acuña, who injected timbral color and rhythmic texture into most of the compositions on the
program and followed McFerrin off the deep end in several rapid-fire exchanges of rhythmic motives,
random pitches, and mutually acknowledging smirks.

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San Francisco Classical Voice: Bobby McFerrin’s Spirited Call to Sing Out 4/13/10 3:03 PM

McFerrin’s technique is so formidable that some members of the Pacific Mozart Ensemble were visibly
taken aback by his impressive range, which he punctuated at one point by traversing three octaves in
only three notes. In addition to the polyphonic ostinatos of the chorus and Acuña’s menagerie of
percussion instruments was a beatboxer who occasionally provided a steady hip-hop, swing, or Latin-
jazz beat to the ensemble texture. If you closed your eyes during their dual departure on the staple
bebop tune Anthropology, you might have been tricked into thinking there was actually a drum trap-set
on stage, but even when you kept your eyes open it was still a bit difficult to believe that there wasn’t a
horn there, too.

For McFerrin, though, singing is believing. He proved this halfway through the concert when he got
most of the audience to hesitantly (but successfully) sing, in perfect unison, Charles Gounod’s famous
Ave Maria, a melody that Gounod superimposed on Bach’s C-Major Prelude from the Well-Tempered
Clavier, Book I. Yet what of the keyboard accompaniment, you ask? Bobby McFerrin, that master, sang
it, note for note.

Kwami Coleman is a Ph.D. student in musicology at Stanford, with a concentration in jazz history. He
was formerly an artist's liaison with Jazz at Lincoln Center.

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