Major jazz festivals across the United States and around the world, like those in New Orleans, Newport, Monterey, and Montreaux, have been cancelled due to COVID-19. Some virtual streaming options are available, but there are still other ways to get your vocal jazz fix. As we continue our exploration of music that grew out of the Black experience in the U.S., today’s focus is scat singing. A new documentary film, Ella Fitzgerald - Just One Of Those Things, released in 2020, offers some extraordinary performances from the woman often referred to as “The First Lady of Scat,” ”The First Lady of Song,” and “The Queen of Jazz.”
We’ve examined doo-wop, vocalese, and a cappella in recent weeks, and now is the time for the great stars of scat to take center stage.
First, let’s examine what exactly scat is, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
Scat, also called Scat Singing, in music, (is a) jazz vocal style using emotive, onomatopoeic, and nonsense syllables instead of words in solo improvisations on a melody. Scat has dim antecedents in the West African practice of assigning fixed syllables to percussion patterns, but the style was made popular by trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong from 1927 on. The popular theory that scat singing began when a vocalist forgot the lyrics may be true, but this origin does not explain the persistence of the style. Earlier, as an accompanist to singers, notably the blues singer Bessie Smith, Armstrong played riffs that took on vocalization qualities. His scat reversed the process. Later scat singers fitted their styles, all individualized, to the music of their times. Ella Fitzgerald phrased her scat with the fluidity of a saxophone. Earlier, Cab Calloway became known as the “Hi-De-Ho” man for his wordless choruses. Sarah Vaughan’s improvisations included bebop harmonic advances of the 1940s. By the mid-1960s Betty Carter was exploiting extremes of range and flexibility of time similar to those of saxophonist John Coltrane. The vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross also phonetically imitated horn solos. In the 1960s the Swingle Singers recorded classical numbers using scat syllables but generally without improvisation.
This Jazz Academy at Lincoln Center video features vocalists Michael Mwenso and Brianna Thomas demonstrating scat.
The history of scat, depending on who’s telling it, often starts with a rumor.
George Burrows wrote about the myth for The Independent in 2018.
If you go to hear a jazz singer at your local venue, you will most likely experience “scatting” or “scat”. Scat singing can be disconcerting because it involves the singer departing from the melody of a song in improvisation and abandoning traditional lyrics in favour of apparently nonsensical utterances such as “doo-yah-dah-dah-dit-dip-bah!” (to quote from Louis Armstrong’s 1927 recording, “Hotter Than That”).
For some people, scat marks the descent of jazz singing into meaningless nonsense and unseemly expression. Even the great jazz critic Leonard Feather suggested that: “Scat singing – with only a couple of exceptions – should be banned.” But, is scat really meaningless and, if not, how can we make sense of it?
Despite the existence of scat-like singing in the folk music traditions of West Africa and Europe (for example, Scottish mouth music), it is most likely that scat emerged in jazz in the early 1900s when singers in New Orleans began to imitate the first jazz instrumentalists. Legend has it that Louis Armstrong, the great trumpeter, vocalist and pioneer of improvisation in jazz, became the first to record scat in the 1926 track “Heebie Jeebies”, when he forgot the words during a recording session.
Here’s that record, set to a few photos of Armstrong’s Hot Five. The vocal starts around the 1:20 mark, and the scat about 20 seconds later.
However, the oft-repeated myth about Armstrong “inventing” scat due to a dropped piece of music has been rejected by academics and music historians. Writing for the University of Chicago, Brent Hayes Edwards thoroughly debunks the myth.
Scat begins with a fall, or so we're told. In his second Okeh recording session with his Hot Five on 26 February 1926 in Chicago, Louis Armstrong recorded a lyric by Boyd Atkins called "The Heebie Jeebies Dance." The words are not particularly memorable, a jingle about a dance craze: "I've got the heebies, I mean the jeebies/ I'm talking about those heebie jeebies blues/ That's what they call it boys,/ Mix it in with a little bit of joy/ Say don't you know it, you should be shown/ These naughty blues, I want to teach you,/ So come on and do that dance they call the heebie jeebies." Supposedly the practice takes of the tune went smoothly, but a fortuitous fumble as the band was cutting the record transformed the song from one of the first journeyman efforts of a studio band to one of the most influential discs in American popular music. As Armstrong himself tells it:
I dropped the paper with the lyrics--right in the middle of the tune . . . And I did not want to stop and spoil the record which was moving along so wonderfully . . . So when I dropped the paper, I immediately turned back into the horn and started to Scatting . . . Just as nothing had happened . . . When I finished the record I just knew the recording people would throw it out . . . And to my surprise they all came running out of the controlling booth and said--"Leave That In."1
In the liner notes to an Armstrong reissue, producer George Avakian remarks that there are "several versions" of the story. Others present, like trombonist Edward "Kid" Ory, told Avakian that "Louis had the lyrics memorised, but forgot them (or at least pretended to, Ory adds with a grin). Louis says he doesn't remember, but he, too, offers a quiet smile.2 As Philippe Baudoin, Gary Giddins, Richard Hadlock, and others have pointed out, it's a rather unlikely anecdote.3 And although this session is often credited as the "origin" of scat singing in jazz, there are many other earlier practitioners of the mode. Baudoin notes Don Redman, who recorded a scat break of "My Papa Doesn't Two-Time No Time" with Fletcher Henderson five months before "Heebie Jeebies."4 Will Friedwald, in Jazz Singing, points to vaudeville singer Gene Green's half-chorus of imitation-Chinese scat in his 1917 recording of "From Here to Shanghai," and mentions other overlooked figures including Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards, who scatted on a December 1923 record of "Old Fashioned Love," and used to work in a theater accompanying silent movies "with his ukulele as well as with singing, vocal sound effects, and 'eefin'" (the word Edwards used before anyone had thought of 'scat')."5 In the late-1930s, the champion self-promoter and deft revisionary historian Jelly Roll Morton told Alan Lomax of his own role in the mode's origins more than twenty years earlier: "People believe Louis Armstrong originated scat. I must take that credit away from him, because I know better. Tony Jackson and myself were using scat for novelty back in 1906 and 1907 when Louis Armstrong was still in the orphan's home."6
Regardless of who actually was the first scatter, or the inventor, there is no question about the fact that Armstrong popularized it. Mike Springer explores the earliest example of Armstrong scatting on film.
In October of 1933, Louis Armstrong and his "Harlem Hot Band" arrived in Copenhagen, Denmark for a series of eight shows at the Lyric Park theater. Thousands of fans mobbed the railway station, breaking through police barricades and climbing on top of train cars just to get a glimpse of the great jazz trumpeter as he stepped from his train.
Nowadays the Copenhagen visit is remembered because it was the first time Armstrong was ever filmed in concert. The Danish director Holger Madsen recruited Armstrong to appear in his feature film København, Kalundborg Og -?. Armstrong had made a cameo appearance in a 1931 film called Ex Flame, and on a sound stage the following year in two short films--a Paramount Pictures featurette and a Betty Boop cartoon--but the Copenhagen footage is the earliest of Armstrong playing live with his band.
The performance was filmed on October 21, 1933 at the Lyric Park. There was no audience in the theater during the filming. The shots of people applauding were made at a different time and spliced into the scene. Armstrong and his band play three songs: "I Cover the Waterfront," "Dinah" and "Tiger Rag." The nine-man band includes Armstrong on trumpet and vocals, Charles D. Johnson on trumpet, Peter DuCongé on clarinet and alto saxophone, Henry Tyree on alto saxophone, Fletcher Allen on tenor saxophone, Lionel Guimarez on trombone, Justo Baretto on piano, German Arango on bass and Oliver Tines on drums.
Enjoy Armstrong’s vibrant performance of “Dinah” from Ex Flame below; keep in mind, as Springer writes, that Armstrong and his band are performing in an empty theater.
Now that we’ve gotten to know the sultan of scat, let’s shift gears to a diva—Ella Fitzgerald, The First Lady of Scat.
Signed by Decca Records, Fitzgerald released her first song, the million-selling ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’, based on a 19th century nursery rhyme, in 1938, bringing her instant fame and recognition. She took control of the orchestra following the death of leader Chick Webb, renamed ‘Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Orchestra’, before the band disbanded in 1941. Touring with the jazz-trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie’s big band, her solo hits of 1947, including Flying Home, Oh, Lady be Good, and How High the Moon, coincided with the rise in the dynamic shuffling, rhythmically complex style known as bebop. Blessed with a technical prowess and melodic heft, Ella was a towering singer whose honey toned voice spanned a three octave range.
You don’t have to be a jazz or scat fan to appreciate her incredible artistry and unparalleled virtuosity on “How High the Moon.”
One of my all time favorite scat hookups is Fitzgerald in a duet with Mel Torme at the GRAMMY™ Awards in February 1976, answering this question: “What is jazz?”
Mel Torme, who was nicknamed “The Velvet Fog,” got his start with his own group, Mel Torme & The Mel-Tones.
Mel Torme was a child actor and musical prodigy. He began singing at the age of three, studied piano and drums, and at 15 published his first song which was recorded by Harry James. In 1942 he joined the band of comedian Chico Marx as drummer, singer, and vocal arranger, and in 1943 he formed his own group, the Mel-Tones, and appeared in his first film, Higher and Higher, with Frank Sinatra. The Mel-Tones, a precursor of contemporary vocal jazz, were popular during WWII and enjoyed several hits on their own as well as with Artie Shaw's band.
In 1947 Torme began a solo career, recording popular songs in his smooth-as-satin voice which reached into both the baritone and tenor range, performing in the best clubs, and appearing in films. His version of "Blue Moon" from the film Words and Music (a fictionalized biography of the Richard Rodgers/Lorenz Hart partnership) topped the charts in 1949, and he picked up the moniker "The Velvet Fog." By the 1950's he gave up crooning and turned to jazz, recording some of his most memorable work with the inimitable arranger Marty Paich and top West Coast musicians. Torme's perfect intonation, enviable range, sensitive phrasing, and improvisational ability brought him great acclaim as a jazz singer. But he was also recognized as an actor, earning an Emmy nomination for his 1957 role in "The Comedian" on TV's Playhouse 90.
Torme died in 1999, and his New York Times obituary offered up fulsome praise for his career.
Mr. Torme was 30 when he met Red Clyde, the jazz producer who founded Bethlehem Records, and decided to switch gears and move toward jazz. From 1955 to 1957, he recorded seven albums for the label, including ''Mel Torme With the Marty Paich Dektette,'' a pop jazz classic featuring a 10-member ensemble (arranged by Mr. Paich) that combined the power of a big band with the freedom of a small ensemble. ''I wanted to embed in the minds of the public at large, particularly jazz fans, that this syrupy, creamy bobby-sox sensation was taking the musical bull by the horns and singing the kind of music he wanted to sing,'' Mr. Torme later recalled…
His reputation as a jazz singer continued to grow, based on his live performances. In 1976 he won an Edison Award (the Dutch equivalent of the Grammy) for best male singer, and a Downbeat award for best male jazz singer.The ground swell of recognition accelerated after a triumphant 1977 Carnegie Hall concert with George Shearing and Gerry Mulligan, which Mr. Torme viewed as a turning point in his career. He later recorded five albums with Mr. Shearing, whose cool, romantic pianism perfectly complimented Mr. Torme's serene vocal style.
''It is impossible to imagine a more compatible musical partner,'' Mr. Shearing said after hearing of Mr. Torme's death. ''I humbly put forth that Mel and I had the best musical marriage in many a year. We literally breathed together during our countless performances. As Mel put it, we were two bodies of one musical mind.''
Torme never failed to give props to Fitzgerald, either.
Moving into scat and bebop, I found this treat on YouTube: It’s a clip from the 1975 PBS special, Dizzy Gillespie’s Bebop Reunion.
I would be derelict in my duty if I didn’t post at least one scat solo from the late great “Sassy” Sarah Vaughn. Here’s “Scat Blues,” recorded live at the Berliner Jazztage Festival in November 1969.
Vaughan died in 1990; her own New York Times obituary paid tribute to her “vocal instrument.”
Where more idiosyncratic jazz artists like Billie Holiday excelled at interpretation, Miss Vaughan was a contralto who gloried in displaying the distinctive instrumental qualities of a voice that had a comfortable three-octave range and was marked by a voluptuous, heavy vibrato. Known for her dazzling vocal leaps and swoops, she was equally adept at be-bop improvisation and singing theater songs with a symphony orchestra. Among the singers of her generation, only Ella Fitzgerald enjoyed comparable stature.
''She had the single best vocal instrument of any singer working in the popular field,'' the singer Mel Torme said yesterday. ''So much so that I used to call her the diva. At one point, I asked her why she had never opted for an operatic career. She got kind of huffy, and said, 'Do you mean jazz isn't legit?' She was very defensive about being a jazz singer. Where someone like Benny Goodman was able to split his musical image and record Mozart concerts, she wanted to perform precisely where she was.''
Throughout her career, Miss Vaughan was affectionately known as Sassy or the Divine Sarah. The first nickname reflected her sense of humor and the mischievous sexiness that often inflected her singing and stage patter. The second, appropriated from the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, acknowledged her phenomenonally versatile voice.
As far as female vocalists who grew out of the Fitzgerald and Vaughan tradition go, my top pick will always be Betty Carter, also known as “Betty Bebop.”
The documentary filmmaker offers this succinct version of Carter’s story.
Betty Carter was an American jazz singer known for her improvisational technique, scatting and other complex musical abilities that demonstrated her vocal talent and imaginative interpretation of lyrics and melodies. The vocalist Carmen McRae once remarked, "There's really only one jazz singer – only one: Betty Carter."
I had the good fortune to interview Carter several times, see her live in both New York and Washington, D.C., and visit her at her home in Brooklyn. She was a force of nature and one of the few musicians who refused to be dictated to (and exploited) by record companies—instead, she started her own.
The jazz world lost a great voice when she died in 1998. Peter Watrous penned this superb obituary for The New York Times.
Ms. Carter sounded like no one in jazz, with her own diction, her own phrasing and her own sense of pitch. Though she was firmly inside the jazz-singing tradition, she was an abstractionist as well, and for her words were pliable. On her early material -- she began a solo recording career in the mid-1950's -- her light, pure voice sounded instrumental, with curved, beautifully shaped notes. It was immediately noticeable that she was after something different, and that her technique, always extraordinary, was there to work for her ideas. It was equally clear that she was a jazz musician first and a singer second.
About a decade after beginning her recording career, Ms. Carter refined her originality into a style that became the template for modern jazz singing. On ''Look No Further,'' recorded in 1964, Ms. Carter uses her voice against the bass, then as the band comes in her note choice mirrors the experimentation of instrumentalists like John Coltrane and Miles Davis; during the same session she recorded ''My Favorite Things,'' a composition associated with Mr. Coltrane. Her improvisations were explosive, tumbling out in great leaps at a velocity that expressed unfettered artistic freedom.
But it was artifice. Ms. Carter was one of jazz's most articulate small-group arrangers, and few musicians have ever controlled tempo the way she had; woe to the young musicians in the band who could not navigate the shockingly abrupt tempo changes or keep up with Ms. Carter's fastest or slowest tempos. Her snapping fingers, marking off the time, sent generations of musicians back to the practice room, chagrined.
Watch Betty Bebop’s stellar take on “My Favorite Things” below.
If you get a chance, you should see Michelle Parkerson’s 1980 documentary film …But Then, She's Betty Carter.
This lively film is an unforgettable portrait of legendary vocalist Betty Carter, one of the greatest living exponents of jazz. Uncompromised by commercialism throughout her long career, she has forged alternative criteria for success — including founding her own recording company and raising her two sons as a single parent. Parkerson's special film captures Carter's musical genius, her paradoxical relationship with the public and her fierce dedication to personal and artistic independence.
William R. Bauer’s Open the Door: The Life and Music of Betty Carter offers an in-depth look at Carter and her music.
Sadly, one of the other masters of scat singing also joined the chorus in the sky in 2017— jazz master vocalist Al Jarreau, who was known as “The Acrobat of Scat.” TV-One produced this documentary for their Unsung series.
Rolling Stone chronicled Jarreau’s remarkable career when he died.
Over the course of a career that spanned more than 40 years, Jarreau collaborated with artists like Miles Davis (the jazz legend also performed a song named after the singer), George Benson, Jill Scott, David Foster, David Sanborn, Chick Corea and many more jazz giants.
In addition to winning seven Grammys, mostly in the Best Jazz Vocal Performance category, the singer was nominated an additional 18 times, including a 1982 Album of the Year nomination for his platinum-selling 1981 LP Breakin’ Away. His most recent Grammy nominations arrived in 2013 with three nods: Best Jazz Vocal Album (Live), Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist [“Spain (I Can Recall)”] and Best Children’s Album (JumpinJazz Kids – A Swinging Jungle Tale).
Check out this remarkable performance, recorded in Germany in 1976, to get a sample of seeing Jarreau live.
Though he’s not categorized as simply a scat singer, modern-day audiences are thrilled by the vocal prowess of Bobby McFerrin.
Bobby McFerrin is a restless seeker who knows no bounds; his story is one of ceaseless self-discovery and generosity of artistic spirit. He has continually redefined not only his own music but the very role of the artist. In a world where others push product, Bobby McFerrin promotes experience. His concerts are not about supporting his latest release, but about the release of creative energy. This is go-with-the-flow music, created on the spot, never to be repeated.
Bobby McFerrin is genre-defiant and pigeonhole-o-phobic. His palette is every style of music he’s ever heard, a genuine cross-cultural cross-breed. It’s jazz, pop, R&B, classical and world music — or, more accurately, out-of-this-world music – all rolled into one, sometimes within the same song.And yet it’s also none of the above. Bobby adopts and adapts to musical vocabularies of any and every kind, and from them he invents new ones.
Those who have never been to one of McFerrin’s performances may have heard that he’s something special, he’s different, that his gift is his own. But still, they arrive as skeptics: What can this man possibly do that they haven’t heard before? They soon find out. Many have tried to describe the Bobby McFerrin experience, but there’s simply no way to explain a voice that — like the Starship Enterprise – goes where no man’s has gone before. How can one define, using mere words, the wordless? How can something so emancipated and unpredictable be reined in?
Check out this amazing collaboration with Chick Corea, filmed in Spain back in 2012.
Scat can also be a subject of humor—nothing is funnier than this Key & Peele routine, which is that much funnier after you’ve taken this journey with me.
This 2016 scat duet between comedian, Orange is the New Black actress, and jazz musician Lea DeLaria and late night host Conan O’Brien was hilarious. Who knew Conan could scat?
I’ve probably left out far more on scat—and scat singers—than I’ve posted here, but this will have to suffice for this Sunday’s offering. Join me in comments for more.
Don’t forget to scat your way to the voting booth, so we can be-bop sha blip bop Trump right out of office.