Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wants it all. He has already racked up a No. 1 single, Don't Worry, Be Happy, an infectious bit of island-inclined, jazz-inflected pop that is giddy and good-natured enough to turn a forced march into a dance contest. Simple Pleasures, the album on which Happy appears, has already sold close to 1.5 million copies in the U.S., and is occupying impressive territory on the Billboard album charts: No. 5 and climbing...
...catching, ear- gracing commercials for Levi's 501 jeans. His four-octave voice has topped Down Beat magazine's readers' poll for best male singer four years running -- that's one award per octave. For the past three years, he has also taken away Grammys for Best Male Jazz Vocalist. Now, after spending two of the past three years on the road (performing as many as 116 concerts annually), Bobby McFerrin is setting his sights on something serious. San Francisco. Home. Family. And true glory: "I want to be the Scrabble champ...
...undeniable soulfulness moved one member of the rap group Run-D.M.C. to call him the "beat box of all time." In Germany, where he found his first wide audience, his nickname is the Stimmwunder (Wondervoice). What McFerrin does ranges so widely, from scat to rock to jazz and off into the twilight zone, that any number of names can suit him. The "Body Electric" is what he calls himself, with some bemusement. Plain "terrific" will do very nicely...
After taking up the piano, he formed the Bobby Mack Jazz Quintet during his senior year in high school ("We put 'jazz' in the name so there wouldn't be any surprises") and in 1970 dropped out of Cerritos College to hook up with the Ice Follies. It was not until a half-decade later that McFerrin "heard my subconscious tell me to sing -- the result, no doubt, of years of soul- searching and a nagging voice that kept pressing me to take risks." Now the risks have paid off handsomely, and exhaustingly. Feeling tapped out, McFerrin ended his latest...
BIRD. Clint Eastwood's passionate biography of jazz great Charlie Parker hits the high notes, and finds new blue ones, in the story of a genius who could resist everything but temptation...