Word: mcferrin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...smiles when he says it, but in fact the game has some serious resonance for him. "You find a word, but you don't stop," he explains. "You're constantly looking for alternatives, never settling for the obvious." McFerrin, 38, has been a musician for all his professional life and a singer for more than a decade. From his first big-time gig, playing piano in the Ice Follies band, to his current in-concert, one-man musical parody of The Wizard of Oz, he has never settled for anything less than unique...
...McFerrin counts classical music and '60s rock as his two major influences, but his vocal acrobatics and his 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...
...favored, Whitmanesque sobriquet makes even more sense as an evocation of a McFerrin performance. He appears onstage alone, his only instrument a mike, his only prop a bottle of Perrier, and the song will take him over, take him away. He sings lyrics, he sings rhythms, he sings sounds. "Singing without words is easier," he says. "Consonants get in the way. It's hard to sing as fluidly with lyrics." He will slap his thumb against his chest to make a bass tone as his hand becomes the snare drum. The mike, rubbed against his close- cut beard...
...benign musical madness, that should come as no surprise from a singer who had written five plays by the age of 15. Born in New York City, where his father Robert helped break the color bar at the Metropolitan Opera by singing a major role in Aida in 1955, McFerrin grew up mainly in Los Angeles "in what they now call a 'dysfunctional family,' " he says. "I didn't get what I needed from my parents. They were busy dealing with their own pain." McFerrin started studying music theory at six and learned from his father "how to breathe musically...