Magical Night

As I mentioned yesterday, I got to see Vinx perform last night at an outdoor jazz festival. As always, it was a show that leaves you exhilirated. Vinx is one of those rarest of musicians whose work is completely unique. No one else sounds like him and his music is really impossible to describe or categorize. He usually performs with just percussion and voice, though last night he also had a guitarist with him on some of the songs. What makes it most incredible is that he has the ability to use percussion to create melody and harmony with his voice. I would never have thought that was possible if I hadn't heard it myself.

I have a long history with Vinx and it's a story worth telling. It must have been 1991 or 1992, I was on the road doing comedy and I was sitting in a hotel room at about 4 am, unable to sleep. I was flipping channels and came across a Showtime Coast to Coast music special, which was basically this big jam session. This particular one had Herbie Hancock, Sting, BB King, Bruce Hornsby and a bunch of other great ones so I watched it. At the end of the show, Sting said he wanted to bring out someone new that he had recently discovered and signed to his record company, and he introduced Vinx. He and Mark Smith came out with percussion instruments tied to their body in various ways and performed a song called "Tell My Feet I Made It Home". The total uniqueness of the sound and his soaring voice just blew me away. A few months later I was in a record store and just happened to catch the name Vinx on a CD case and I remembered the name. It was his first CD, Rooms in My Fatha's House. I bought it, of course.

Later that day we had a huge ice storm that shut out all of the electricity to my house and virtually everything else in the area. As night fell, there was total darkness and total silence, as there were no lights and none of the background hum of machinery that we get used to every day. The silence and darkness - real silence and darkness - was really quite profound. I laid in bed and put that CD into my discman and listened to it for the first time with this background. That CD is dedicated to Vinx' father, who was murdered in Detroit by muggers, and the last two songs on it are about his father's death. The first of them, Don't Got to Be That Way is angry, lashing out at the men who killed the man he loved so much. You can feel and relate to the pain and anger he must have felt. The second, A Little Bit More, is gentle and moving, as he comes to terms with the death of his father and manages to find peace after so much pain. By the time the last song finished, tears were rolling down my face as I lay there in the darkness, oblivious to everything but the pure emotion expressed so beautifully by this man's music. It's a feeling I will never forget.

A few years later, I see in the paper that Vinx was coming to perform at a small club in Kalamazoo. He had two more CDs out by then, and I'd bought them both. And as luck would have it, he was coming on my birthday. That night, I was at the club before 6 pm, intent on making sure I was the first one in the door so I could sit up front. I didn't realize they didn't even open the doors until 9. So I'm standing in the little doorway that the club shared with a pizza place next door when this man walks up behind me and asks if there is anyone in the place. I turned around and Vinx was standing there. We started talking, and found out from someone else that they won't open the doors for at least another hour and a half, so we ducked into this little pizza place and shared a pizza. We talked for a couple hours, then went out after the show and talked for a few more hours. For a few years after that, we kept in touch through email but the last few years he's spent so much time performing in Europe that he hardly ever came around anymore. So when I had the opportunity to see him again last night, I jumped at it.

When Vinx first started performing, he had a poster that described his music as "prehistoric pop". It showed him with his djimbe, an amazingly versatile percussion instrument, and the caption said, "In the beginning, music was just one soulful dude beating out a cool rhythm on a rock as a platform for his voice." In this case, his voice is an incredible instrument on its own. In the course of a single song, he can go from soaring a capella vocals to Bobby McFerrin-esque vocal ticks to gutbucket blues. Add to that the fact that he can make the most astonishing sounds come out of a drum and the combination is unlike anything you've ever heard.

And last night he did something I'd never heard anyone do, 5 and 6 part harmonies with himself right on stage without pre-recorded tracks in the background. He has a foot-triggered vocal effects box that he uses on stage. So he would sing the first part in a certain key and tap his foot, and his voice would replay that little part on a loop. Then he would sing the second part, in a slightly lower key, and that would start looping along with the first part. Then he would do the third one, in a yet lower key, but this time with a different rhythmic syncopation to it, and that would loop in perfect time with the first two. And so on, as each loop added to it, all in his own voice, became this incredible chorus of tightly interlocking vocals as his live voice soared above it all with the melody. This is fairly common in a studio, as a singer backs up himself on a recording, but to hear it done live on stage with that many different harmonies all at once is truly amazing. And judging from the audience reaction, I don't think anyone else had ever heard this done either. The place erupted into a standing ovation.

I haven't asked his permission to do this, but I don't think he would mind since the goal is to get some of my readers to listen to his music, seek it out and buy the CDs and see him perform live if they ever get the chance. I'm going to put mp3s of three of his songs here for people to download and listen to. They're all from his first CD. The first one is Tell My Feet, the second one is My TV and the third one is Porchlight. The second is an amusing song about various TV shows he grew up with. The third is a beautiful song of reminiscence for his childhood. Sheryl Crow actually sang backup on the third song, before she became famous. All three songs demonstrate what makes his music so great - the power of his voice, the truly unique use of percussion, and the ability of his lyrics to move you and make you laugh. What they cannot do is capture the incredibly positive energy you feel at his live show as he brings you into his world and makes you feel at home there. I urge you all to listen, then check his webpage regularly for any opportunity to see him perform live. You have my promise that it will be an experience you will never forget.