A Beat Box with Four Octaves

By JAY COCKS

He wants it all. He has already racked up a No. 1 single, Don't Worry, Be Happy, an infectious bit of island-inclined, jazz-inflected pop that is giddy and good-natured enough to turn a forced march into a dance contest. Simple Pleasures, the album on which Happy appears, has already sold close to 1.5 million copies in the U.S., and is occupying impressive territory on the Billboard album charts: No. 5 and climbing.

Wait, there's more. He has provided the a cappella accompaniment for three animated Just So stories shown on Showtime and narrated by Jack Nicholson, recorded the theme for The Cosby Show and vocalized for the eye-catching, ear- gracing commercials for Levi's 501 jeans. His four-octave voice has topped Down Beat magazine's readers' poll for 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 of 1998."

He 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 too.

His 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, can be the chug of a train or the swoosh of a samba beat. Whether in a Beatles number like Drive My Car or a dazzling reworking of a '60s classic like Good Lovin', the point for McFerrin "isn't to be instrumental but to tell a story. Like an actor, I get into character."

If there is some method in this 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 and anticipate the next phrase. He taught me how to sing commas and spaces, not just lyrics." Shy at school, McFerrin cried easily as a child and lost himself in his own imagination. The Catholic Church gave him a spiritual foundation; music, he says, "was always a catalyst, an outlet."

After taking up the piano, he formed the Bobby Mack Jazz Quintet during his senior year in high school ("We put 'jazz' in the name so there wouldn't be any surprises") and in 1970 dropped out of Cerritos College to hook up with the Ice Follies. It was not until a half-decade later that McFerrin "heard my subconscious tell me to sing -- the result, no doubt, of years of soul- searching and a nagging voice that kept pressing me to take risks." Now the risks have paid off handsomely, and exhaustingly. Feeling tapped out, McFerrin ended his latest concert tour on Sept. 30, and will now work from home, where he can spend more time with Debbie, his wife of 13 years, and their two sons, Taylor, 7, and Jevon, 3.

There are plenty of dreams left. He talks about doing a classical record, "transcribing Bach's keyboard pieces and involving my father in some way." He is forming a twelve-person vocal ensemble he calls Voicestra "to sing and represent me so my music can work while I stay at home." Then there's Scrabble. And Hermann Hesse too. "There's a wonderful Hesse story," McFerrin says, "about a violinist who wishes to be the best in the world. His wish is granted, and as he's playing, he slowly disappears into the music. That's the hope of every artist. It's certainly mine." Fine, Bobby. Just don't slip away too soon.

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles