Taylor McFerrin

Taylor McFerrin, a Brooklyn native who trained himself as a multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, and vocalist, has merged left-field strains of electronic music with R&B and jazz. His first full-length project arrived as the primarily instrumental, dreamlike Early Riser in 2014 on Brainfeeder. After contributing to R+R=Now’s Collagically Speaking in 2018, he completed his second solo album, the more emotive yet still mellow Love’s Last Chance, issued through From Here Entertainment in 2019. During this period McFerrin forged close ties with Flying Lotus and Robert Glasper, among others.

His earliest recorded credit came as a background singer on “Jubilee,” a track from his father Bobby McFerrin’s self-titled 1982 Elektra debut. Roughly two decades later he began attracting attention on his own. In 2006 he released the broken-beat EP Broken Vibes, issued once on vinyl in a limited run of 900 copies. That same year he co-produced and supplied beatbox vocals for Ty’s “What You Want (Taylormade).” The following year “Go with Love” appeared on the second volume of Brownswood Bubblers, the flagship compilation series from Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings. McFerrin soon connected with Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder imprint; the RYAT-fronted single “A Place in My Heart” surfaced there in 2011 and was later featured on Brownswood Bubblers Six.

While amassing a substantial backlog of unfinished material, he eventually selected a portion of it to assemble into Early Riser, released on Brainfeeder in 2014. The album featured contributions from Bobby McFerrin, Cesar Mariano, Thundercat, Hiatus Kaiyote’s Nai Palm, and Robert Glasper. In exchange McFerrin delivered a remix of Hiatus Kaiyote’s “Laputa” and became a member of Glasper’s R+R=Now collective. The rapid sessions that produced R+R=Now’s 2018 album Collagically Speaking prompted McFerrin to set aside his perfectionist tendencies and adopt a comparable method for his own follow-up. He returned the next year with Love’s Last Chance, on which his vocals occupied a central role throughout, in contrast to their sparing presence on Early Riser.