Another beautiful night in downtown
The place is super quiet and all you hear is Bobby using his voice and patting his chest with his hand and it is incredible. Beat on top of heartbeat in that short instance, you realize how vast his vocal acrobatic arsenal really is.
Jack comes in working a hand drum and Chick starts painting on piano and we are immediately delivered to their universe. It is a landscape that is open where the plains meet the sky and the elements of the jungle can be beautiful and dangerous all at the same time.
Tonight’s performance will be 90 minutes straight and they are off to play in the caverns of your mind. The music is its own mantra as you are taken on an adventure; carefully checking out a new world around you as sounds, sights and things that are unfamiliar to your present themselves!
What is Bobby? Is he a singer, a master of vocals, a human instrument? He is all of these things. As he becomes more musical you visualize him less as a human being and hear his audible more as a morphing instrument. Hiding in plain sight he becomes invisible even though you are starring right at him. You forget about human sounds, trios, and concert halls and focus on incredible, cognitive, imagery traveling and telling stories through sound and movement.
Bobby pretends to be a bird and the audience mimics his sound. He realizes that he has the power over the audience and as they reply in near perfect pitch, he directs them and they fall in like a perfect chorus. It is so seamless that you would think that he planted this portion of the audience to pull off this effect. From bird to conductor to cowboy riding a horse to whatever is imaginable; the road is open, the tank is full and the night has a thousand stars!
Chick and Jack seamlessly change the landscape, the scene, the stars like a kaleidoscope of sound. Bobby to a seat next to Chick on the piano bench and they both start playing the together until the dual melodies blend into one. The two are pretty funny as one gets up and the other sits down and then go behind each other’s back and continue to play a long stridish melody. Bobby has got it worked out now when all he does is point and the audience responds in a game of Simon Says!
Bobby, Chick and Jack are having the most fun like they were 5 years old, came across some magical instruments and just started to play and everything was beautiful and everything made perfect sense. Bobby’s falsetto has the pristine tonal qualities of the single strike of a bell ringing and resonating in the stillness.
Percussively, melodically and harmonically, the three play at playing in a vat of imagination and non-stop creative continuity. No instrument, surface, string, pluck or vocal tonality is spared.
I have an visual perspective; Bobby is standing under the spotlight singing in angelic phrases. I can’t see him because he is blocked by a speaker but, what I can see, dancing on the ground is his silhouette. As he holds the microphone away from his mouth, I see his fingers march like he was playing a magic flute while his dreads move like a scene from Alien 3.
There are moments when there is no sound and the guys move in silent rhythms like mimes, making gestures, silly moves and expressions which all transform into a Chinese movie battle between Jack and Chick with Bobby making the B-movie sho-gun sounds. Jack and Chick switch instruments and seamlessly the sound does not diminish or augment but abstain in the highest form. Talent, skill, and unbounded imagination, these three warriors transcended music with sound, movement and visual images that took you back, around and beyond the jazz stratosphere!
LeRoy Downs
