Bobby McFerrin Interview

In the Room with Bobby McFerrin from On Being on Vimeo.

Bobby McFerrin Workshop!

Totally high. I’m at the Omega Institute in New York State, just after the first night of a workshop with Bobby McFerrin. The Master

thanks to pitch, rhythm and God for the picture. Oo. Pitch rhythm and God?

Circle songs
He creates them quickly. No premeditation. He gets a feeling, starts singing something, turns it into a loop, looks around for which voice it is, assigns it appropriately.  Creates another, off he goes.

He creates parts which he can break into chunks. It’s like a dolls house that you can take parts off. You can take off the whole roof, or this or that chimney, or all chimneys leaving the roof, or the whole roof again. By which I mean, he’ll give three voices the same part in harmony, and the part can be split in two. Then he plays call and response. Sometimes with one voice, silencing it one round while he sings in the gap that creates, bringing it back in again one round while he stops singing, silencing it again and singing back. Or he’ll do that with half the part – silencing it for the first half of the loop and singing, bringing it back for the second half. Sometimes he’ll do that with one voice, the top voice, say, keeping the lower two voices of that part, sometimes he’ll do that with all three voices, just leaving, say, the bottom three voices keeping a different part of the sound going. Like sometimes peeling off the trees, and sometimes peeling off the trees and the earth showing the bare rock beneath.

The conductor in the middle plays solo. They’re not taking from the group sound, the group doesn’t subjugate to support them; they’re contributing. Giving whatever they can to raise the energy. Bits. Pieces. Artful little contributions. The energy raises. They alter the piece. Add something. A hey on an off beat. That gets gradually louder. An underlying beatbox. Something that gives.

It’s brilliant. It’s fucking brilliant.

Small group improv
Wowweeeeee I can’t say how delighted I was to see what they started with.
A group of five. Bobby got going with a loose little loop that sometimes stuck to the pattern and sometimes didn’t. Gradually each singer began to contribute something complementary. All voices relaxed and soft. Everything playful and delicious and musical. The piece meandered, grew, took a left, up a sharp hill, down a soft slope, suddenly in unison, now polyphonic again, Oh My God this is heaven and I want to jump in and I want to swim and swim and live in this.

The four singers accompanying him are the teachers. They are Rhiannon, Christiane Karam, Joey Blake and David Worm. They are humble and brilliant and beautiful and I want to sit at their feet and apprentice myself to them, to Rhiannon and Bobby in particular.

There is embodied grace, embodied humility, embodied excellence, a palpable spirituality that is about grounded authentic play, play with elegant beauty, play with beastly snarls, play with all that it is to be human, but all that so subtly, because above all it is music and it is very very musical. Sometimes I find, in myself and in others, that when the musical expertise is lacking an over-expressiveness can take over to compensate. These guys have the balance.

Here are some of the things that they said.

Someone voiced my question: what are you doing when you do that? They said things like this:

I’m thinking, co-operate, co-operate, co-operate. Blend in. Don’t do anything tricky.
Give away. Find out where you fit. Trust. We have each others’ backs. A lot of love. Being very quiet. Listening for what’s being given.

Everyone has a tone, sound and rhythm. Don’t be impatient. Take time to listen for what the person is doing.

Not really thinking. Anticipating what they might do (often wrongly), supporting and accompanying.

Practice informs and enriches your vocabulary. Listen listen listen to all manner of things. Among other activities that will develop your vocabulary.

It’s all jazz. Be loose, be free, don’t think too much about it, let the music come out.

Skill building. Become confident to jump in. At first it will be fearful, of course. “Anything worthwhile doing, if it’s new, you’ll be a little afraid of it.” (Bobby).

Watch the music come out. See where it goes.

Practice
Play with different sounds, the whole alphabet. Play with each consonant against each vowel. Quickly. Light and agile. Play your way through the whole alphabet in something like a minute.

Could be supported by an underlying slow groove circle song.

Someone can lead it. Calling things like chord number – singing the instructions. And say things like: Stop. Hold a silence. Then, Go.

Humm. What can I do, each week, little by gentle little, humble by playful humble, enjoyably, to expand my vocabulary?

Circle Song

We did a lot of circle song with David. He gets us all singing a repetitive rhythmic kind of backing track and we take it in turns to improvise over it. It's taken from Bobby Mcferrin. Who took it from ancestral African traditions. In many ways it's like what we do all night in The Tent on Mbira camp.

So I'm listening to Bobby McFerrin circle songs on Youtube and I'm starting to think about the possibilities for gathering a group of performance quality singers, maybe a pan-European flexible come and go group, with different constellations of singers gathering for performances in different places

I'm thinking about developing some kind of show that's a mixture of the individual singers' work maybe and some circle songs, and doing some fun playful participatory stuff with the audience, I like that part a lot

I'm thinking about progressive circle songs - I really like the way this one of Bobby's builds so gradually and continually as a whole piece. I'd kind of like it to have some kind of key change perhaps at some point - that's getting quite western, you don't have key changes in, for example, Hindustani (Indian) classical and Shona (Zimbabwean) improvisation-based music. You just have really gradual organic progression within a single key or chord sequence.

Then I'm thinking about the form of Indian classical music, and how you could bring that into circle songs.

You start with the alap - low and slow and arhythmic. The sounds enter like the rising sun; first the gradual, soft lighting of the sky. At some point some way in, the actual sun appears on the horizon. Because of the gradual play preceding it, it's a breathtaking moment, electric like a first touch within chemistry. It's when the improviser reaches the 8th note, (in other words the base note, the tonic, one octave up).

The arrival of each new note is an Event, and one that is lingered upon. Atul described it to me like a road trip. "First you are in England. England is Sa (the 1st). Well you go about England preparing your journey. Then you move - and it is a journey - over to France. France is Re (the 2nd). Now you're in France, do you go straight to Germany? Germany is Ga (the 3rd). No! You stay in France. You play for a while, visit some friends. You play around the edges. Then when you arrive in Germany, it is quite an event!"

And so on. And all the while, softening, softening into the music, softening into the experience of letting the music sing through you rather than you pushing and forcing it out of you.

So that's Alap.

Then a beat comes in. It's low and slow. You improvise but every 12 bars or something a little repetitive phrase comes in that marks the kind of corners that are emerging within your form. Your improvisation stays mellow but moves from the arhythmic quality of the alap to a rhythmic quality in resonance with the beat.

Next the beat quickens. Your improvisation does too. The drummer gets more playful. So you do you. You rise together; the pace, the speed of your sonic movements, the tones, rise rise rise until you reach your first climax.

Next, the intensity goes back down half way. Now enters a melodic composition. It will be a little thing, maybe 8 bars, maybe 16 or 32. You'll sing it a few times over. Then you'll start to play with it. You might sing bars 1 - 4 of the composition, then improvise for 4 bars, then come back for bars 5 onwards. Next round, you might improvise for four bars between bars 4 and 5, and four bars between bars 12 and 13. Then you create bigger gaps in the composition for your improvisations, and more of them, then more and more, until the composition is literally in shreds, tiny strips that give a thematic kind of fiber to the improvisation, and you can whip and weave them around each other. By this point both the melodic soloist and the drummer are going crazy, improvising with wild abandon, beyond all control, yet still within the form and feel of the music, until the final peak is reached, and gradually like the slowing and softening after orgasm, the music moves towards the still intimacy of silence.

I wonder if it's possible to weave some elements of that musical form into circle song. With the right group of people. I wonder who those people would be.

Bobby and Aziza Mustafa Zadeh

carmen

Scat exercise

Fundamentals of improvisation

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Centerpiece

Bobby Sings Vivaldi

I love this. Sometimes improv gets scary and messy. Something like this is safer. And fantastic discipline.

How do you gain the skills to improvise well in a fun way?

I've pretty much hated all of my formal musical education, apart from learning from Atul and Chartwell.

Ave Maria's Bach prelude

Here's the music

I've adapted it (just in pencil on my printed copy) to fit my range which is from C below middle C to top C, by moving the basenote on the 1st and 3rd beats of the bar up an octave, starting on the first bar of the second page.

Sesame Street

We've been talking about touring festivals next year. I'm interested in the kind of vocal jams we get going in workshops, and about the new creative challenge of how you get that kind of thing going in a looser jam rather than a workshop.

I like this.

So I've experienced two kinds of jams. Actually they're not jams, it's a jam and a session.

Sessions are performance led. People jump in with a piece to perform. Everyone else either listens or joins in. When they join in they either join in because they know the piece, or they make it up.

With a jam, someone starts a chord sequence or a rhythm and then other people build stuff on top of that. Diva moments ripple around chaordically.

I'm over-clarifying. Jams often become session-like and sessions often become jam-like, but technically there are two different things going on.

So McFerrin's approach to creating a vocal jam in an informal session might be to do a performance that he's the leader of, which involves getting everybody singing playfully, to begin with by call and response.

So how do you get people into whale song without words? In an informal jam?

Ooo now there's a challenge.

Todd did it at Dance camp. We were doing biodanzer and we'd all ended in a very very big close knot of people standing so close we didn't have to hold ourselves up. He started a loud hum and everyone joined in with different notes that then harmonized chaordically in that wonderful way for about five minutes and it was golden. Golden!

So the dance camp crowd are well trained. There's a difference between long ooommms, and higher risk contributions like melodies, rhythms and silly noises.

Maybe you have part of the crowd primed. If I kicked something off when Loose was there, she'd start playing all over it and other people would follow her lead.

Humm. Something to play with.

Looks like there are two ways to do what Bobby did: 1) write it; 2) make it up on the spot.

Bobby rocks again

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

More bobby

Bobby Mcferrin is my new hero