Barbican London Solo-voice master Bobby McFerrin outlayed most ofhis gig playfully jamming with his associate performers and the assembly writes John Fordham

For the last thirty years, Bobby McFerrin could have delighted himself with only being, as they say, "an act" – and an peerless one at that. Possessed of a four-octave voice, lightning improv reflexes, and the capability to impersonate all from an show drum to a Charlie Parker crack piece for one person around the receptive to advice of a car alternate gear, he stays the master of the solo-voice show.

But an action he refuses to be, and even at a Barbican unison (backed by Pete Churchill"s excellent 28-piece London Vocal Project) bending to his majority ambitious-ever album, McFerrin still outlayed majority ofthe gig jamming with his associate performers and the audience. Inevitably, his skills entice a: "How the ruin does he do that?" But he additionally reminds listeners that all amiability carries the same instrument as him – and that music"s roots are communal, that stardom has no commercial operation obscuring.

Typically he began seated, sensitively singing a small uptilting falsetto tune whilst violence the slit on his chest. Adeeper, soul-vocal line emerged (inMcFerrin"s in isolation language, that sounds similar to English but isn"t), thereafter his heading register-leaping skids, finale on a finger-snap. He thereafter got the church band to sing a riff to the basses, playfully conducting the extemporaneous overlaying all the approach up to the sopranos, prior to unfurling his own makeshift line over the top.

A yodelling normal sadness with mimicked slide-guitar fills followed, thereafter a cheesy Fly Me to the Moon, and a Flight of the Bumble Bee delivered as if the insect were buzzing around his head. Later came a whispered Bach Prelude No 1 whilst rags of the assembly sang the Charles Gounod Ave Maria counterpoint. In in between the piece for one person flights, 4 tools from the singer"s new multi-genre VOCAbuLarieS manuscript were conducted by their composer Roger Treece – complex, vividly phony tapestries mostly phrased as fatiguing African genealogical chants.

The church band sounded at the majority positive and ardent on this rehearsed material, but though Treece"s essay wasdeft, it veered toward a westernised Lion King shimmer that faintly mixed with McFerrin"s regard and naturalness.

In the end, however, it was the duets with the assembly on all from James Brown"s I Feel Good to McFerrin"s own Don"t Worry Be Happy, the startling beating-wings receptive to advice in theBeatles" Blackbird, a perfect comment of Charlie Parker"s Donna Lee, and the modest QA event with low-pitched illustrations (instead of an encore) that reverberated afterwards.