Try This at Home

Customer Reviews:

Fun with Music.......2005-04-12

Put Bobby McFerrin in front of an audience with a microphone and you have surefire entertainment that is guaranteed to leave everyone feeling good. Is there any artist today who is more immediately likable than McFerrin? It doesn't hurt that he is completely at ease with any kind of audience, that he has a marvelously flexible voice coupled with real musical imagination, and that his improvisations never fail to please.

In this DVD of a live 2001 performance at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis he walks onstage, barefooted, in jeans, in dreadlocks, and starts warming up the audience with some 'Harmonizin'' followed by the title improv: 'Try This at Home.' My wife and I found ourselves singing along, laughing uproariously at the interaction between McFerrin and audience members, and our spirits were uplifted. I don't know how he does it, but anyone who could watch this and not respond must have a heart of stone. There are several highlights: I was particularly touched by his improvisation on the name of a little girl in the audience--'The Name Song'--and later when he asked a rather staid looking gentleman to contribute something, the man started a tentative blues number that McFerrin took up with gusto and soon had all of us singing along again--'The Head in My Bed Blues.' He got a number of people to come onstage and had them 'Walkin' on the Beat.' McFerrin moves seamlessly between improvs for a total of fourteen of them.

This is vintage McFerrin. That such a musically talented man (he comes by it honestly; his father was concert and opera singer Robert McFerrin) has developed a uniquely personal style of making music and interacting so joyously with an audience is nothing short of a modern wonder.

Heartily recommended.

TT=45 minutes

Scott Morrison

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