A History of Collaborative Vocal Improvisation
WeBe3 in concert. Left to right, Joey Blake, Rhiannon, David Worm.
In one sense, humans have been vocally jamming together for, I assume, all of time.
In a contemporary Western sense, Collaborative Vocal Improvisation is a modern approach to vocal music emerging at the turn of the millennia in and beyond the U.S.
Bobby McFerrin was and remains a huge pioneer of vocal improvisation. He created a vocal orchestra, Voicestra, in the 1980s in the San Francisco Bay Area, which gradually specialised in improvisation. Typically, Bobby would guide the improvisation from the centre, in a form called CircleSong or Circle Singing. This has become a thing in itself, culturally, and you can find Circle Singing events in many parts of the world now.
Meanwhile, when Bobby’s career focused elsewhere, Voicestra members Rhiannon, David Worm and Joey Blake asked together, how do we do this without Bobby? Essentially they were asking, how do we share leadership? They figured it out and created the pioneering trio, perhaps the world’s first ever CVI trio, WeBe3.
Rhiannon loved teaching CVI and became a powerful, international teacher. She developed many forms for helping singers enter the artform. These are documented in the book and exercise cards, Vocal River, and her teaching continues to develop.
The artform continues to evolve through Rhiannon’s students.
For example, The Elements Quintet, who had mostly studied with Rhiannon, were therapeutically oriented and developed therapeutic applications of CVI with one another. Members were myself, Shay Nichols (Hakomi, RCS), Christopher Kuntzsch (coach), Green Huse (MamaGena) and Sam Rogers (NLP). I, Briony, now seem to be a leading teacher of these therapeutic CVI approaches. We also released what we believe to be the world’s first entirely improvised 5 voice CVI album in 2017, entitled Listen.
CVI is spreading as practitioner groups sprout and bloom around the world. What will the next part of the story be?
Here is an interview with Rhiannon giving more detail about the birth of Collaborative Vocal Improvisation.
Interview with Rhiannon
By Briony Greenhill, 28th March 2018
The intention of this interview was to document the lineage of Collaborative Vocal Improvisation, for the community of practice.
Briony
Thank you so much for making the time for this.
I just want to let you know how continually in love with this work I am; and how deeply grateful to you I am. I make my living now teaching vocal improv in the UK, and it’s pretty much supporting me. The way it’s helping people get to the heart, to connect and to heal via the voice - there’s so much grace in this, and I feel so indebted to you, and so humbled, and so appreciative of you. So, very deep thanks for your life’s work.
Rhiannon
Thank you Briony. Thank you. People don’t always say it so clearly as that :)
1. The Early Days; Bobby McFerrin’s emergence and leadership
Briony
So Rhiannon, what happened?! The story I’ve got in my head is: it starts with Bobby - you’re off at drama school and then you’re becoming a jazz singer; meanwhile Bobby studied jazz piano at University, he was a pianist, then he’s 28, he’s walking along the street and the penny drops, he’s like, “o I’m a singer” and he goes underground for 6 years, lives in a basement, stops listening to other music, gets a gig in a hotel round the corner once a week singing jazz standards; and he says, what’s my music and trains his voice; what sounds come from me when I’m not trying to do anything external. Was that the beginning?
Rhiannon
It wasn’t 6 years. You’d have to ask him particularly that. My understanding is that it was a bit more - this “urban legend” is what you’re saying - it was more gradual than that. He was working as a pianist playing for dance companies. And then he realised he needed to sing.
Then I believe he just began to study what that meant. I don’t think it was that extreme, from one thing to the other. When I met him he was singing in clubs in the Bay Area. He was singing standards. He wasn’t singing original music. He was a really fluid, beautiful improviser. That was in the early 1980s.
He played with local bands; he had a nice reputation locally. But, that was it. Before that he had been touring. He met his wife in New Orleans. He was playing with a band in hotel bars, stuff like that, travelling around, being young, met his wife… lalalala. Then they moved to the Bay Area, they settled into the Bay Area. They both really liked it there, really good artistic community. He began to very much settle into the clubs there.
I went to see him fairly often, because the word was out that he was just a very interesting singer.
Here’s what I remember. I went to see him one night at a place in Albany - Earl’s Solano Club which isn’t even there any more. He did an a capella version of Spain where he jumped octaves with his voice - you know how he does - he sings the baseline then he jumps up into the melody and back, so that you feel that he’s creating an orchestra in his mouth. That was the first time I saw him do that, and when I watched that I remember thinking, ‘holy shit - the world just changed’. For me as a singer. To think about a voice being able to accomplish a whole orchestral feeling.
And then, a little bit after that he made his first album, which is really interesting but it doesn’t have very much multi-tracked stuff on it. It’s a little bit, it was a label trying to figure out what to do with him. You know when you listen to him, his regular singing voice when he’s just singing standards or singing songs, is not nearly as innovative an instrument as when he takes the whole song over and makes an orchestra out of it.
So he got this record deal and I thought well… good bye Bobby! I don’t remember the label - it was a big label that got a hold of him, and it looked like he was just going to leave San Francisco and start touring. I had met him by then; I had introduced myself to him. He was doing events where he was having people sit in, and I would go and sit in. We were becoming friends, I would go to his house. It was a small town, San Francisco, at that point. Way before all the .com things happened.
There were a bunch of singers that knew him. Tuck and Patti…. His gigs would be really interesting because he was doing more innovative stuff. He was starting to do some solo things, sometimes with bands and sometimes solo. He would invite singers, so we had a lot of different times together on stage. It was really fun.
So I thought ok he’s gone now.
Then he came home, and he wanted to start Voicestra. He wanted a 12 member ensemble where he could really think like a conductor of an orchestra. We started using circle singing as part of our rehearsal process. We were rehearsing pretty intensively. Usually it was at least once a week, sometimes more.
Briony
Didn’t you guys have Mondays? I think I heard you had every Monday all day for a year.
Rhiannon
Maybe it was Mondays, I don’t remember. He was probably going off singing on weekends and then he would make sure he was home. He really managed that.
It was very intensive. There were different phases. In one phase we were learning the repertoire from Medicine Music, his first album. We were singing repertoire, so we were learning to blend, we were learning his charts, we were learning his particular way of putting music together. But it was repertoire. Then in our rehearsals, we were spending all our time learning to sing different kinds of scales, learning to blend low voices and high voices, learning to blend from one genre to another, he was starting to put out these exercises which would become improvisations, and they were really fascinating, it was hard work. The rehearsals were very intense. If you wanted to be in there you had to practice and you had to show up.
So it came down to 12 people, and then they started booking tours. He had already started singing solo concerts in Europe - he had begun touring by himself, and he was getting a really good name for himself, but he was determined at the same time to be developing this Voicestra group. So he did that and then we started going on tour. In the beginning we had costumes, we had repertoire - it was really heavy economically, because there were a lot of people to afford and a lot of stuff that had to get carried around.
At some point in there we went to Brazil, and we did these really interesting concerts which were part repertoire, part improvisation. For some reason all our flights were delayed and we had gigs at the Great American Music Hall as soon as we got back. Because everything was so late getting back, we went into those concerts without any of our stuff, and Bobby said, ‘ok, we’re just going to improvise’. He stood 13 stools on the stage, and we did our first improvised concerts. We had a whole run. And from that point on we stopped doing repertoire; we let go of the costumes… we let go of the - we had these pieces of set we had to move around! So that meant lighting design and back stage crew and… oh God. So it went down to 13 chairs, 12 singers and Bobby.
And we just developed a way of doing circle singing all night.
Briony
Was that still Bobby in the centre improvising? Was it collaborative, emergent improv or was it Bobby giving people parts?
Rhiannon
It wasn’t collaborative emergent improv, it was circle singing. A bit of the way, maybe a quarter of the way, I could count on him looking over at me and going, “go Rhi!” He always gave me a place to improvise during the evening, which was incredibly uplifting and educational for me because I was doing it in front of thousands of people. I was learning my craft of improvisation in these really beautiful settings. It was daunting but it was very exciting because I had to come up with it!
Briony
How thrilling! And was that mainly you or would he go, “go Joey” or “go Dave” or “go Judy”?
Rhiannon
He would do that to other people but he consistently did it with me. I think he felt my desire, he felt my… I’d already been improvising. Those years with Alive, the women’s jazz ensemble, I improvised a lot in that band. But I was still trying to figure out what my take on it was. With Alive there was always a band behind me. I was doing sometimes improvised language, I was making up a lot of stories - but I wasn’t doing it all alone. With Bobby he would just say Go! And I’d be all alone and I’d take to the stage and I would figure something out!
Briony
What kind of age were you then?
Rhiannon
What?
Briony
So this is by the mid 80s, late 80s?
Rhiannon
Yeah. Mid to late 80s yeah. We started doing some performances in ’86; I think it was really a couple more years before we started really touring. So we were doing that and then he would have people solo - there were people he really favoured for soloing, like Marlon Sanders; he loved the way he soloed. He would go to people that he thought were ready.
Briony
Hold on one second, I just have to put a log on the fire.
Rhiannon
:)
Briony
(Returning) It’s amazing; I’ve gone through this snowy snowy Welsh winter with only log fires, and wrist warmers and long underwear and wool sweaters and I like it!
Rhiannon
Briony I heated my stove in Point Reyes with wood for 20 years, so I really appreciate what you’re saying.
Briony
It’s great to get direct and not go via oil companies or pipes or what have you.
Rhiannon
Yeah. And you have to pay a lot of attention! You can’t let the fire go out!
Briony
You can’t. You’re really actively tending your environment. It’s really relational.
Ok so Bobby’s the conductor.
Rhiannon
People were soloing but definitely he’s holding it. So that went on in a really beautiful way. That was incredible. We toured all over Europe, we played big jazz festivals in Europe, we toured all over the U.S., we were in Brazil, Canada, Asia, Japan…
At some point in there his management was screaming at him that he was spending too much time with Voicestra which wasn’t making enough money. You probably remember this period when he started conducting classical orchestras, and he was doing duets with Chick Corea, then he would play with the Yellowjackets, he was just all over the place and Voicestra became a part of the year but certainly not as much.
So, that was the point where Joey Blake, David Worm and I said to each other, well what if the Voicestra is… we all thought it was going to be our life’s work. So what if if this isn’t what we think, and we need to go forward? How can we create an improvisational form in which there is not a leader, a conductor? That’s when it happened. It wasn’t out of disrespect of Bobby; it was with the understanding that what he was doing was very particularly him, his style - and we wanted to think in our own way. That’s what you want from your creative partners.
I’m assuming that anybody who uses my teaching methods pays respect to me and says my name; and also, you add your own flavours and you develop your own exercises depending on your students and your brain and your music, and in the end you’ve developed quite a bit of your own form. To me that’s the way it should be.
So Joey, David and I helped form a group called SoVoSo, you know them, which still goes on. David’s the only original member now. We were improvising and we were doing repertoire. That was a good learning, there were just 6 of us; and there was no leader - but still, quite a bit of it was repertoire. There was improvisation inside of it, and everybody could contribute pieces but, meh, it was still repertoire and at some point I just hit a wall because Improvisation is what does it for me.
You understand. It’s that way you connect to spirit and repertoire just doesn’t do the same thing. It’s really allowing spirit full force, full energy.
So, I left that group - which was really hard; and I started doing solo concerts for a while. I did completely improvised solo concerts. But then I realised I actually didn’t like it! It’s really Bobby’s thing. When I was doing it I would get so scared before the performances. I would feel so frantic inside about how it was going to go; I just thought, this isn’t a good idea! This is not making me happy.
I dug deeper into my teaching. Way, way deeper. I’m pretty sure that’s how my teaching became such a strong thread in my life, in that it was my performing. It was a way for me to study what I wanted to study, which is, how do you teach other people to improvise? How do you create improvisation with a shared leadership? How do people understand how to perform on stage without a leader and without repertoire?
And to me that is still the deepest work that I know.
What I’m doing now is going across culture. I have a certain frustration that I don’t have as much cultural diversity in my classes as I wish there was; because that’s when you get the ultimate! Because everybody’s coming with their people inside of them, and you get these ancient song lines coming through.
We’re going for more scholarship money.
There’s so much terrible stuff going on in the world, and if you’re an immigrant or a minority or you don’t have so much money, your focus is on survival so much. It’s very difficult.
I’m teaching more in Hawaii now, I’m asking people in large part to come all the way to Hawaii. So that’s where we’re doing the scholarships. It is a huge frustration for me because I value multicultural work just hugely. I know you understand.
Briony
Yeah. I do, I do.
Rhiannon
So, when I left SoVoSo David said, I’m not done with you yet. And I said, I’m not done with you yet! We did something together and Joey in his beautiful naming way called it WeBe3.
We had a little bit of work, I was working in Europe…
Do you know Oskar Boldre down in Italy and southern Switzerland? He’s an extraordinary guy. He saw Bobby early on where he was doing circle singing with us in Europe, and he started doing it with his choirs; he makes a living as a choir conductor. So he teaches circle singing to his choirs, and he teaches them original music that has a lot of invented language in it. So he does these concerts…. he’s a very unique, really special guy. He has a team of people who create a series of vocal concerts and workshops. So he invited me for a couple of years and finally I said, look, you really want WeBe3. So they hired us for a bunch of years and that got us starting to travel in Europe, and that was quite successful but I was booking all of it. It’s just so much work; so, so, so much work. So we did that a bunch of years, and finally I said I just can’t book it myself, we need to hire a manager. That is sort of where we got stalled because we had different ideas about what a manager should do, how much they should be paid, so we hit difficulties - and it gets more and more expensive to tour. So when we can go out with Bobby, that’s heaven. I don’t feel at all done with WeBe3 but it’s a business thing.
It’s how to manage the business of WeBe3 so that we can work, and we can be financially solvent and that it’s not too physically demanding.
When you all started The Elements that was really encouraging. Then there’s the group in NY - Sophia and Nick and Tiago - they are now in different time zones; they’re in their early 30s and they’re all travelling, and they all have a lot of other work. So, I don’t know if they’re going to be able to hold it together.
They were really good at doing these short videos they would post online which were so funny and attractive, but to my taste not as musical as they needed to get. They’ve all taken All The Way In (Rhiannon’s year-long course). They’ve got really interesting potential but I don’t know that they’re going to be able to hang together across the distance.
I think there are some things in Europe. I often go to that gathering in Denmark - Aarhus - every other year. It’s put together in part by the guy who has VocalLine - the big vocal ensemble for Copenhagen. It’s a choir, but the way they do choir is really incredible; it’s so innovative.
They have a vocal festival in Aarhus that’s specifically for interesting vocal groups. WeBe3 has gone there a couple of times. Take 6. The Real Group from Sweden who’ve been together forever - many of the big vocal groups from Europe go there. I’m interested but a lot of times, once groups get to that level of fame, they have this bottom end bass voice that’s just so driven by the soundboard not by the voice - you know they just put a big boom on the bass voice so there’s really a lot of sound effects. It’s like they wouldn’t succeed if they were standing around singing without a sound system.
I’m more interested in what’s coming along in all different cultures of a cappella music, that innovates with folk music but takes it to some other places and interesting rhythms.
I’m really interested in shared leadership a cappella music.
Briony
And this emphasis on shared leadership; is that from you, Rhiannon, is it your personal passion or did it come from the inherent needs of the form?
Rhiannon
It’s totally my choice. I feel like it’s also a political and social innovation.
I don’t feel like leadership on the planet is doing any good at this point. They’re corrupted by the time they get into any position of power and they don’t do it well. Where the innovation, where the interesting stuff happens, is in more local ways where people are still figuring it out together. So, to put it back into the music, I just think it’s more interesting music! Because why would one person have all the ideas? Why wouldn’t you want everybody’s most creative self? Therefore, everybody needs to be able to feel like they got some leadership potential or they’re not going to bring their ideas forward, because there’s not room.
That’s what I learned with Bobby, as much as I loved those years with Voicestra. Oh. My. God. I loved it so much.
But…. Alive, the women’s jazz ensemble - that was shared leadership, I wasn’t the leader. It goes back to the very beginning of my training and my performance work. I came up through the women’s movement! The Women’s movement was all about that, shared leadership.
That’s what I grew up understanding is how do we get the best out of humans? Don’t put one person in power, they’re going to blow it! It’s just the way it goes. Even if they don’t mean to, they just owe too many people too many things; they can’t get past it. But if you have shared leadership, I think it’s very possible.
Joey and David were totally amenable to that. And with three of us, you never know who is going to start the next improvisation. It was very important that it was shared in that way. You get the best music. Is that part of The Elements?
Briony
Yeah! Well, it’s fallen into some gender tendencies. The women seem to have more leadership than the men. All of us will start at different times; it falls into the women using language and creating the melodies, and the men creating the structures and the bass and the rhythm. Which is ok… except… I think we want to hear the male voices more; we want to hear the male song. The male words, the male vulnerability and heart and spirit.
Rhiannon
Exactly. And the only way you get there is rehearsal time - personal rehearsal and group rehearsal. The women can do the beatbox, the women can do the baseline. They do it differently, but there is no reason not to have that be shared.
The men can learn to do the stories, but they’re going to have to practice; they’re going to have to be vulnerable in a certain way they’re not…. It makes everybody more vulnerable.
And in the end, I’m never going to be able to sing bass the way Joey sings bass; however, I can sing bass in an interesting way. I can hold the bass. And I learned that from singing with Joey and David. Joey was saying, I want out of the bottom! I want outta here! And David’s always going to be able to do the percussion the best. But Joey’s much better at it, and I’m not too bad! So then that means, we could do a triple percussion thing! We could all be doing it. Or we could all be singing some kind of bass version of a baseline that allows some kind of a triple bass solo to go on.
Just to let go of our roles - we’re so…. oy ya yoi.
So that could take you a long distance Briony in terms of opening up The Elements to new things.
Briony
Cool, thanks Rhiannon.
This is what’s amazing about this work… You know when you talk about the soundboard and the bass end…. It’s like yeah, this is more delicate than that, and it stays kind of human, it stays delicate like a spider’s web, like dew on a spider’s web.
You know at Tamera (a peace research village in Portugal) they have this beautiful meta-political narrative of what’s going on. They say, look, we’re in 5000 years of this violence-trauma-fear matrix. There has been violence so people are traumatised, they’re fearful, and there’s less resourcing because people are withholding in their fear, and then in their fear and their under-resourcing people are violent again and then that’s more traumatising…. And it goes around in circles for 5000 years until it’s hella normalised and producing all of these awful effects.
They call that the trauma-violence matrix. And they say people can be downloading from the information plug-in to the trauma-violence matrix and perpetuating it.
And they say there’s a second matrix and it’s the Sacred Matrix. Everything that lives has a sense, has an imprint of the Sacred Matrix. It’s where there’s collaboration, abundance, health, holistic thinking, the Aho Mitakuye Oyasin - the web of all life.
What Tamera is trying to do is create a network of healing biotopes around the planet where we can do this at all levels - personal, social political cultural - this shift from the trauma matrix to the sacred matrix.
In one of our concerts we did in Marin, afterwards, a woman came up and said, “oh my God, you took us into the Sacred Matrix!”
And this work does that. It does that with my students in their personal development and their healing.
I never forget at Omega the WeBe3 concert; you guys just cast this net of the most beautiful uplifting golden healing love over all of us, and it felt magical.
There’s something in this kooky, dewy-spiders web, can’t-tie-it-down, won’t-be-tamed artform, that’s very difficult to record, very unreliable to perform, can anybody actually do it, it’s so vulnerable to pitfalls - composition is much safer, and yet - doesn’t have this magic.
Rhiannon
It’s true! It’s always given me such a deep love for my students, because they could choose to do something way simpler and safer and less vulnerable, but instead they come and want to do this.
I feel so protective of putting it out in the public before it’s ready… because you can fall so… apart! And yet everybody that’s done this kind of work… especially those kind of shape-shifting exercises where you’re really focusing on each other and you’re creating this whole world, you’re not thinking about an audience at all, you’re just creating this world and doing this healing work for each other and for the planet at large, or wherever you’re putting the energy.
I believe in it. I believe in it so much. Bobby’s never talked about it like that, but I know that that’s how he feels.
I think a lot of artists have felt that way, and I think it’s important to try to articulate what it means. Because the more we are able to try to articulate it and be vulnerable in that way - and not just say mumbo jumbo words, but to really try to talk about it - I think it increases the capacity. Just like if you say the word “prayer”, it makes you vulnerable, but you’re acknowledging that you’re about to try to enter that realm. Or if you talk about it as spirit work, and you need to come up with it.
You can’t say that ‘somebody’s going to be healed’ by what you do, but if you’re willing to say, this is what we’re after, this is what our desire is - I think it’s important to make the intention.
And I think when we’re improvising that’s the agreement we’re making with each other; we want to do this work that’s uplifting. It’s beyond entertaining. We don’t mind if it’s entertaining, that’s really good. But it needs to be uplifting in a way that cracks open the space around, so we can see what we can do… I’m pretty sure that’s our job description.
And if we don’t say it - if people get afraid to say that for fear it’s going to sound lalala or whatever, then we don’t get to have it. I think we gotta be willing to try to acknowledge what we’re trying to do. Don’t be afraid.
Briony
Yes! And it’s like, Bobby was doing that himself, but also, I feel like, by retaining the control, he was taking care of a kind of QA - Quality Audit - he wasn’t entering the chaos of the leaderless - and so he could rely on it to please audiences, rely on it to sell records - because it was neat like that.
By sharing out the leadership, on the one hand you lose the quality audit possibility right, because it goes out to the group. But on the other hand, it touches then this magic that you can only touch when you surrender completely.
Rhiannon
Well… yeah, I think a few things.
I think for Bobby to give up control - I don’t think I understood how hard he is on himself about musical excellence. Because he’s got this pixie kind of self - he’s so light and so darling. And he’s really got huge standards around musical excellence.
So, in order for him to let go of control, he has to feel like everybody in that circle is at that musical excellence place. For example, when he duets with Chick Corea, I think he’s not controlling. I think he’s dueting with Chick Corea. Neither one of them is running it.
We had a tour a few years back, WeBe3 and Bobby, and ostensibly we were sharing the evening. He invited us on this tour, we had a bunch of dates in Europe. And, they didn’t go as happily as we all hoped, and I think we all felt it.
I think it was partly that thing where Bobby was not willing to let go of control. He was so used to being on the stage improvising with other voices as the leader, and we were used to being his singers.
So we were all responsible for what happened. When WeBe3 sings, I’ve got nothing holding me back, I do whatever comes into my imagination because I know David and Joey are here for me, and I am there for them. 100%. With Bobby, I was saying, I wonder if Bobby wants to solo here? As soon as I’m doing that, I am letting go of my power. We kept talking about, how can we get past this? The three of us talked it over. Then we did some rehearsals with Bobby where we tried to get further, but I think it was all 4 of us were complicit in not quite being each other’s contemporaries.
I’m very interested to do these gigs in Minneapolis later on this year because we’re in a different place now. We did some singing at Omega last summer in which Bobby was really vulnerable, because he was singing for the first time in a year. He really let us in. He let us just do what we wanted to do; we felt like we needed to hold him more so we went further; the whole thing balanced.
Now if we can do that in front of an audience of jazz lovers in a nightclub in Minnesota, that would be iconic, that would be a really big step. I feel that WeBe3 did take another step that was really important in the history of vocal improvisation, which was shared leadership. But we would not have gotten there if we hadn’t gone with Bobby all those years, to have his massive understanding of world music, and musical excellence, and orchestral understanding of what the voice can do.
Briony
Yeah. Wow.
Hey Rhiannon how does this relate to jazz and the evolution of Jazz? Jazz is an American cultural creation that’s perhaps 100 years old, and then you and Bobby both started in jazz. So, this emergent collaborative vocal improvisation; is it a branch of jazz, has it left jazz, is it an evolution of jazz? How does it relate to jazz?
Rhiannon
I consider jazz the music that I studied as an adult so that I could sing what I’m singing. It’s a great music of study. I read this interview the other day in a jazz magazine by this guy who doesn’t play strictly jazz at all, he plays all kinds of music but he said, Jazz is this incredible music to study - because its harmonic structure is so interesting, its melodies are so interesting, its rhythmic structures are so interesting. And so if you study jazz you increase your musicality in a huge way - and wherever you go after that you’re always carrying the wisdom that you learned in jazz. So it’s always there.
When I was studying jazz as a young woman in my twenties, I thought of it as an important historical music, but also a music of freedom. So my impression was, it’s supposed to break open constantly and be reinventing itself. Now, that said, I don’t think that a cappella music is very deeply regarded in jazz - not really. There are jazz choirs in all kinds of jazz schools, but they’re really separate from the instrumentalists who consider themselves the innovators in the form.
I think somehow jazz choirs have their own set of innovators. But what Bobby did which was really wonderful - he sang a lot of the standards but he was singing all the vocal lines that the instrumentalists were playing. He was singing the baselines, he was singing the percussion - he really sang like a small jazz ensemble. That’s the way he taught us in the Voicestra. Joey teaches a lot of R&B, but he has really a big love of jazz, he knows really a lot about it. David came up through those big pop ensembles, like the Tower of Power - he’s a trombone player. But he’s also a deep lover of jazz. I think if you consider anybody that goes beyond one genre in American music, they’re going to start looking at jazz and once they start looking at it if they’re serious at all, they see what an important tool it is.
I’ve never really thought of myself as a “jazz singer” - but if I’m going to hang with anybody, it would be with the jazz people! Because they’re the most interesting! They’re always singing these interesting lines, new things are happening.
But what happened for me is, I started collecting a lot of world music, a lot of ethnic music from different places and I got way more interested in that. And I felt like jazz was just this one corner of the world. I thought the lyrics were extremely tiresome - they’re either very sexist, or they were very vague - you know like these abstract - what are you talking about?! So I wasn’t interested in the lyrics, I started changing lyrics…
But when push comes to shove, I’m with the jazz people. I’m sure Bobby would say that as well.
The band Bobby’s touring with at the moment, the SpiritUAll band, it’s very American roots gospel music, only it’s embedded with a sophistication of jazz rhythms, and Bobby’s sensitivity to making incredible melodies in his improvisations. If you study enough jazz melodies you have some really interesting melodies inside your head.
So, yeah. I’m really interested to see where he is by the time we meet in June. I feel like he’s come through some huge fire, and I’m sure he’s more devoted than ever to the spiritual nature of what he’s doing. He’s a beautiful guy.
Briony
Well, Rhiannon… I feel like that’s good for now. This is so rich, and so deep and so fabulous. Thank you so much for taking the time to tell me all these things.
Rhiannon
You’re welcome Briony. You came in a really respectful way, and I appreciate you wanting to know this because I think it would be very good to have it in print somewhere so people can see there is a lineage and there is a pathway, and we’re in this together.
Do you know Anna Johnson? She created this Facebook page for vocal improvisation which I think is a great development, and could probably be developed further. We need these common places to go and find out what’s going on around the world. Like you don’t know Oskar! Maybe you and Oskar would meet and you would love each other! I just don’t like that singers don’t know each other. That’s how information gets lost.
Different ideas are coming up; I will certainly tell you when I think of anything, because we just want this to grow from a lot of different points of view.
Briony
Right. We want this to grow from a lot of different points of view.
Well, Aho marvellous lady, thank you for existing and being in my life and sharing all of this.
Rhiannon and to you. Wonderful to talk to you.
Briony
Love to Jan and the cows and the tea plants
Rhiannon Yeah you would love the studio, it’s so beautiful. At some point I’m hoping you’ll get over here, maybe next year.
Briony yes maybe in March!
Rhiannon. Yes! I wish you the best, the best the best,
Lots of love
You too!
Good bye.
Good bye