Jazz : History of Singing, According to McFerrin

Bobby McFerrin, whose Voicestra played to little more than half a house Saturday at the Universal Amphitheater, has undergone one of the most complete reversals of direction in the annals of vocal jazz. From “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and the other solo masterpieces, he has moved on to the Voicestra, an 11-piece group that he heads and which attempts, in two hours, to cover just about the entire history of singing.

When the voices work in harmonized lockstep, their blend is magnificent. At other points they subdivide into various permutations; sometimes the women seem to simulate a reed section while the men play the roles of a brass team.

McFerrin was not content simply to present the Voicestra for the fine ensemble it is. Too often there were attempts to touch old bases, from “Ave Maria” (splendidly done by Christen Falke, with McFerrin’s gentle arpeggios as counterpoint) to “Chicken,” a trivial scat piece from an early McFerrin album, complete with a painful passage of yodeling.

So eager was the leader to stress his artists’ versatility that the breakdown of the show was roughly 30% comedy, 40% entertainment and at most 30% sheer vocal beauty. Who else would dare to start one piece with “The Lord Is My Shepherd” and end it singing “Ting-a-Ding-a-Ding-a-Da” ad nauseam?

Wordless singing, always McFerrin’s forte, now is in danger of becoming his booby trap. The art of scat is a self-limiting form, in which there are no lyrics to which to give meaning; his unaccompanied passage near show’s end was played strictly for comic values, with outrageous quotes from a dozen sources.

Along the way was a series of dramatic monologues, including a rambling reminiscence about touring Mississippi in 1925 with Ma Rainey. Another was a freedom piece that did little more than cite the Rev. Martin Luther King verbatim. Also unoriginal was the interlude in which several of the singers staggered around and bumped into each other, in the manner of the dolls on the clock tower at Munich.

Perhaps inevitably, the show ended with a hip-shaking, roof-raising rap number, to which the crowd reacted like the wolf pack at the Arsenio Hall show. It would be fascinating to see McFerrin offer a recital in which he could take his singers, himself and his audience seriously; his present direction is hopelessly unfocused.