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Yo-Bob Fusion
| Article
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20452 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
1,687 Words |
| Author
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Michael Marshall
Michael Marshall is executive editor of THE WORLD & I. |
Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin have much in common: a deep love of music, a sense of musical adventure, and fourteen Grammy awards between them. But, while Ma has won his awards for his brilliant classical cello recordings, McFerrin has been honored in the jazz and pop vocals categories, most notably for the bright, calypso-like ditty "Don't Worry, Be Happy," so you would not normally expect to hear them perform together.
Together they are, however, and to great effect, on a remarkable duet album entitled Hush, released earlier this year on the Sony Masterworks label. Voice and cello combine in thirteen pieces, five of them original McFerrin compositions, one traditional, and the rest classical, including compositions by Bach, Vivaldi, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Gounod.
Ma and McFerrin first met at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 1988 during Leonard Bernstein's seventieth birthday party. They struck up a personal and musical friendship and over the past couple of years have explored performing together in appearances with the Boston Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony orchestras. Hush gives us a permanent record of some of the results.
Both men are musical adventurers never content to stand still. Ma, a master technician, is renowned also for his passionate artistry. One critic remarked that he has probably never given a cruise-control performance in his life. He has expanded the rather limited classical cello repertoire by adapting other compositions for his instrument, as Segovia did for the classical guitar. He has even ventured across established boundaries before, playing at Carnegie Hall with a jazz trio in 1988 in honor of the great jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli's eightieth birthday.
McFerrin has experience "crossing over," too. Both his parents were classical singers, his father a baritone with the Metropolitan Opera, and he studied musical theory when he was young. His own musical talent developed in a different direction, but at Tanglewood he met Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa and conceived the idea of conducting a symphony orchestra for his fortieth birthday. He got his wish, leading the San Francisco Symphony in Beethoven's Seventh in 1990 ("All this music is jazz," Bernstein had told McFerrin when he doubted he could cope with its sheer size), and he garnered some very positive reviews. He now devotes four to six weeks a year to conducting.
Actually McFerrin's entire musical career has been a form of
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