As gimmicks go, Bobby McFerrin's one-man-band approach to jazz singing is pretty impressive. Slapping his chest to sketch out a beat, he'll alternate between deep, resonant growls and a skittering nasal falsetto to suggest an entire jazz combo simultaneously. He pushes the boundaries of vocalise beyond Leon Thomas's yodel and Jon Hendricks's virtuosity and into a whole new realm.

Yet even as McFerrin's improvisatory flair and sure sense of song structure ensure that his performances add up to more than mere gimmickry, he's always seemed somewhat limited as a solo act. After all, how far can a melody go if the singer has to keep jumping back down to the bass line between breaths?

With Simple Pleasures, McFerrin eliminates that problem through multitrack recording, building a full-band sound one voice at a time. It's not exactly a new idea – Lambert, Hendricks and Ross did essentially the same thing on Sing a Song of Basie thirty years ago – but McFerrin makes it seem fresh.

How so? Although some of it can be chalked up to the simple fact that nobody else sounds quite like Bobby McFerrin, most of the album's appeal stems from the ease with which he can set out the heart of a song with a single telling phrase. His version of the Beatles' "Drive My Car," for instance, sums up the calculating sass of the aspiring starlet in a lazy, swooping harmony line on the chorus. Sometimes he even does double duty, as with "Sunshine of Your Love," where he manages to recapture the spark of both Jack Bruce's vocal and Eric Clapton's guitar.

Still, the best thing about Simple Pleasures is that it finds McFerrin focusing on the songs, not on vocal agility. Listen to him saunter through the Caribbean cadences of "Don't Worry, Be Happy," and the song seems so perfectly conceived you may not even notice that he neglected to bring a band along. And frankly, that's the sort of special effect technique alone could never pull off. (RS 537)

J.D. CONSIDINE