Following his performance at Drambuie’s penultimate Brass and Crimson session, the music producer and keyboardist recalls discovering a life-changing album while searching through records owned by his father, Bobby McFerrin
I grew up in San Francisco and, like most kids, I was into hip-hop. I remember listening to Wu-Tang Clan’s 36 chambers and Outkast’s first record Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. It was weird because I was more attracted to east-coast hip-hop even though I was on the west coast…
I was pretty young when Snoop Dogg’s first solo record, Doggy Style, came out and, of course, my friends and I wanted to listen it. It got so popular that there were conferences at my school about letting parents know what this music was about. My dad [Bobby McFerrin] was not into it at all. He didn’t want me to listen that kind of stuff, and, before I was able to fully get into hip-hop, he threw away all of my records. But the outcome of that, was that I started to look into my parent’s CD collection for the first time, and that’s when I discovered Stevie Wonder’s early solo work.
Fulfillingness’ First Finale was the first album I borrowed from them, because I was like ‘oh this looks interesting’. Then I just played it over and over on the way to school, which was at least a one-hour bus ride in the morning. It was the perfect amount of time to listen to a whole album, and I was in this kind of barely-awake, headphones-on state, which is one of the best times of listening to music, because it’s almost like you’re in a dream and the music is the whole soundtrack to your dream.
That was when I got into the sounds from that era, the Moog analogue synthesiser, and non-real instrumentation; that’s just the sound that I’ve always loved, to this day. That whole album opened me up to that era. ‘Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away’ is a song that you don’t really hear on any classic soul station – lyrically and musically, that song is probably my favourite from that record.
I remember I had a gig in Jakarta Jazz Festival in Indonesia and Stevie was part of the lineup. All of the artists were staying at the same hotel and when I was outside waiting for the van to take me to the venue, he came out with his entourage. He was standing basically right next to me and I was totally freaking out. It literally felt like I was around an angel. I wanted to say something to him, but at the same time it was just enough to be around him.
