By Bernie Brink

One of jazz’s longest-running traditions is arguably also one of its most misunderstood idioms.  From the music’s inception, vocalists have related melody and improvisation through the practice of scatting, vocal improvisation using nonsense syllables, wordless vocables, or without words or syllables entirely.  At its heart, scatting is a technique intended to mimic horn players – imagine a jazz trumpeter or saxophonist – enabling vocalists to expand their skills and their role beyond lyric interpretation to engage with the band as a horn player would.

Popular jazz lore dictates that scatting originated with Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Heebie Jeebies” from 1926.  As the story goes, while the band was recording, the lyric sheet flew off of Satchmo’s music stand in the middle of the tune, but with the band swinging so well he did not want to stop in the middle of recording.  Instead, he stepped up to the horn and began scatting.  Though the story may be somewhat dubious, the way that Armstrong moves fluidly between some broken lyrics and scatting around the melody does seem to add validity to the claim.  Despite the lore, there are many recorded examples resembling scat singing going back as far as 1911.  But 1926’s “Heebie Jeebies” was influential due to Armstrong’s unique expression.  It’s arguably among the first recordings to feature scatting in a distinctly jazz dialect, and in Armstrong’s vocal performance you can clearly hear the hallmarks of his trumpet style.  Thus, scatting became closely associated with Louis Armstrong and paved the way for generations of incredible vocal improvisers.

Chief among those is surely Ella Fitzgerald, whose 1960 live recording in Berlin is a masterclass of the craft, culminating in her performance of “How High the Moon.”  In this dazzling display of technique, musicianship, and wit, Fitzgerald quotes more than a dozen other jazz standards and popular songs, including her own “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” amidst a five-and-a-half-minute bebop barrage at a blistering tempo of nearly 300 beats per minute.  Such a showing rivals other landmark performances, such as Paul Gonsalves’ epic tenor solo on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.”

The history of jazz is studded with many impressive and influential vocal improvisers, like Betty Carter, Eddie Jefferson, Carmen McRae, Jon Hendricks, Sarah Vaughan, Mel Tormé, and on and on.  Today, the craft is carried on by greats like Kurt Elling, Tierney Sutton, Bobby McFerrin, and Esperanza Spalding.  You can hear all of these and more every Sunday at 7:00 PM on The Voices of Jazz with Jeff Peckham, and the next time you hear a vocalist scatting, try to imagine them as a horn player and perceive their unique dialogue with the other musicians just as you would with Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, or Sonny Rollins.