The deliberate choice of scat syllables also is a key element in vocal jazz improvisation. He achieved a level of complexity and richness in his scat singing that has been widely imitated but has been no more reproducable than Satchmo's soaring trumpet work or Charlie Parker's dizzying saxophone solos. His smooth yet staccato barrages of rapid-fire notes and sounds exiting his lips were built on his outstanding big band arrangement and multi-instrumentalist skills. Mel Tormé, a child prodigy drummer became one of the most influential jazz performers of the 20th century because he perfected scat singing into its own art form. Mel Tormé turned scat singing into a high art. animator Chuck Jones directing a Roadrunner cartoon: Each uses predetermined formulas in innovative ways. Critic Will Friedwald has compared Ella Fitzgerald to Warner Bros. All of Ella Fitzgerald's scat performances of " How High the Moon" use the same tempo, begin with a chorus of a straight reading of the lyric, move to a "specialty chorus" introducing the scat chorus, and then the scat itself. The grand master of the form who popularized it for the generations, Louis Armstrong, could carry the structure of the melodic line seamlessly from his trumpet to his mouth, alternating the soaring highs of his trumpet with the bass, gravel voiced lows of his scat vocals. The melodic lines are often variations on scale and arpeggio fragments, stock patterns and riffs, as is the case with instrumental improvisers. Scat Singing/Various Female Vocalists (Part I) Famous Scat Singers įor a full list of all of the people who have scatted professionally, see List of Scat Singers.Ĭharacteristics The Musical Structure of Scat Singing Scat singing is improvised, but it usually incorporates musical structure. In the late 1970s scat became "cool" again as revival groups like The Manhattan Transfer and R&B/Disco acts like the Pointer Sisters brought scat back to mainstream music.įor the full library, see Scat Singing Videos. Many who lived through that rebirth of Rock in the 1960s and 1970s, including Tormé, became marginalized to the fringes of American music. They were derided as hack "lounge acts" as the Beatles buried the Big Band. Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mel Tormé were not only piorneers of the form, but three of the top scatting vocalists in the world.īy the early 1960s, scat singers, who had been hugely popular, had become dated, old-hat. Scat singing gives singers the ability to sing improvised melodies and rhythms, to create the equivalent of an instrumental solo using their voice and selecting syllabic rhythms and accents that one might hear from a saxophone or trumpet solo. Scat singing is a form of vocal improvisation common to jazz with wordless vocables, nonsense syllables or without words at all. Scat singing: Ella Fitzgerald & Mel Torme cut loose. Mel Torme & Ella Fitzgerald - Lady Be Good 4.1 The Musical Structure of Scat Singing.
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