Jason Morris certainly has talent. He is blessed with a malleable singing voice with a pleasing timbre. He seems at home with the conventions of contemporary pop singing. He favors melisma, but keeps it in check.
For his show "Musically Yogic" at the Metropolitan Room, Morris has surrounded himself with some top-of-the-line collaborators, including director Julie Reyburn, musical director and pianist Tracy Stark, bassist Matt Scharfglass, percussionist Jeff Roberts, and a cluster of vibrant female backup singers, including Tanya Holt and Gretchen Reinhagen. The supporting vocalists sound great throughout the evening, their harmonies twining effortlessly around Morris's plaintive sounds.
Besides being a singer, Morris is a yoga instructor. The conceit of this show is that his hour with the audience is a sort of hybrid of cabaret set and yoga class. He rapidly murmurs New Age-y sounding instructions to his "students" between numbers. I had difficulty hearing all of his rushed words (more about that later), but from my limited exposure to the world of lotus and downward-facing-dog poses, it seems the gist is that if you ground yourself in the present, things will unfold for you in a marvelous way. (That's something I've found to be so—frequently, if not universally.)
While embracing this brand of higher-level consciousness, Morris also lovingly kids it. The number of "F" bombs he drops suggests that this yogic cabaret class is being held in a raucous urban comedy club. At one point during his opening-night performance, he gave the audience a flip of the middle finger with both hands (what is that pose called?). He jests repeatedly that if you're not benefiting from the higher wisdom he's imparting, you can at least get buzzed from the two-drink minimum. Occasionally he plays the role of narcissistic diva, flipping his long straight hair as though he were Cher and saying things to the audience like "You're having a wonderful time because I'm gorgeous." Such pronouncements are seemingly delivered as though enclosed in ironic quotation marks. Some listeners appeared to find them more amusing than I did.
Certain gestural embellishments of Morris's seem to recur at regular intervals throughout the show—they come across as biorhythmic tics at times. In addition to the Cher-hair business, he will lock eyes with individual audience members for a few seconds, giving them a knowing, winking look of connection. And he has a little lizard-like flicker of the tongue that he sets loose every now and again.
He dramatizes his songs aggressively. I would like to believe that he is fully "in the moment" with the lyrical content at all times, but I sometimes wonder. While singing, he often wears a pained look, perhaps emblematic of his sensitive nature—but the expression doesn't always quite fit the lyric he is communicating. For instance, the last line of "Pure Imagination" (Lesley Bricusse, Anthony Newley) is about how harnessing one's imaginative faculties can set one free. A good thing, right? At the performance I saw, Morris closed the song with a look of intense worry—almost fear—darkening his face.
Is it something to do with the Eastern sensibility that Morris employs for his yoga-instructor persona that makes him race so frantically through the hushed words he speaks in his between-song banter? By purposefully shying away from the Western bent toward things cerebral and analytical, is he also maybe rejecting things audible? And he sometimes mumbles or whispers his lyrics, just as he does his spoken patter. For the first minute or so of his first song, I wondered if I would be able to understand anything. In the beautifully arranged version of his encore number, Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," his pronunciation of "rainbow" came out as "rabba." My companion for the evening completely loved what Morris did throughout the show but told me he frequently found the lyrics incomprehensible.
Most successful were the relatively rousing, up-tempo songs, among them "No Reason at All" (Jonathan Reid Gealt) and "Will You Be There" (Michael Jackson). Each of these selections was the second half of a two-song medley, and both had a strong beat and gospel-style flair. I also liked his take on Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"—in part because the overexposed number had a refreshingly non-dirge arrangement for once, and in part because Tanya Holt joined Morris in the song. She, I felt, definitely connected with every syllable of Cohen's lyric.
When singing songs with rhythmic force and/or anthemic heft, Morris seems to escape from his propensity to flutter and mutter. Such selections apparently keep him focused, allowing him to sharpen his diction, raise his voice and sing as if he had ideas worth communicating. In other words, he's grounded in the present and marvelous things unfold. I hope he'll continue to move in this direction in future performances.
"Musically Yogic"
The Metropolitan Room – August 30, September 22
