Scat singing

• 1. Introduction

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  Scat singing asks a human voice to do something almost impossible: to speak nothing, and yet say everything. In February 1926, Louis Armstrong stepped into a recording studio with his band The Hot Five to lay down a track called "Heebie Jeebies." According to a story Armstrong himself told, his sheet music slipped off the stand mid-take, fell to the floor, and he did not know the lyrics well enough to continue. So he made sounds instead. Gibberish. Pure sound. He fully expected the engineers to throw the recording out. They did not. What they captured would ripple outward through decades of American music, shaping jazz vocalists, bop singers, Disney soundtracks, hip hop composers, and even one 1990s eurodance chart-topper.

  But Armstrong did not invent scat, not quite. The story of who did, and how a practice of wordless vocal invention became a cornerstone of jazz artistry, is more tangled than a single name can hold. This documentary traces scat singing from its disputed origins through its technical sophistication, its strange uses in humor and quotation, and its ongoing life in forms Armstrong could never have imagined.

• 2. Before Armstrong

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  Jelly Roll Morton, the jazz pianist, had an opinion on the question of who invented scat, and he was not shy about sharing it. In a recorded conversation with folklorist Alan Lomax, Morton named Joe Sims of Vicksburg, Mississippi, as the first man to perform a scat number in the history of the United States. Morton said that from Sims, the practice spread to Tony Jackson and to Morton himself in New Orleans, where they used it as a novelty introduction to songs. Morton once declared that he and Jackson were using scat "in 1906 and 1907 when Louis Armstrong was still in the orphan's home."

  The recorded evidence supports the idea that scat predates Armstrong by several years. Gene Greene, an early master of ragtime scat singing, recorded scat choruses between 1911 and 1917, including in his songs "King of the Bungaloos" and "From Here to Shanghai." Entertainer Al Jolson scatted through a few bars of his 1911 recording of "That Haunting Melody." Cliff Edwards, known as "Ukulele Ike," scatted an interlude on his 1923 recording "Old Fashioned Love" specifically to avoid the need for an instrumental soloist. Aileen Stanley included scat at the end of her 1924 hit recording of "It Had To Be You" with Billy Murray, released on Victor 19373. Don Redman and Fletcher Henderson recorded scat vocals in their 1925 "My Papa Doesn't Two-Time No Time" a full five months before Armstrong's "Heebie Jeebies" appeared.

  The practice also has deep roots beyond American jazz. Diddling and lilting in Ireland and Scotland, German yodeling, and Sámi joik all involve wordless or nonsensical syllables sung to convey music rather than meaning. Some scholars have pointed to West African musical traditions, in which the human voice and instruments are treated as near-equals and drum rhythms are converted into vocal syllables. Yet that theory runs into a problem: even the earliest recorded examples of scat contain free improvisation by the vocalist, which the West African drum-to-syllable tradition does not fully explain.

• 3. Heebie Jeebies

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  Armstrong described what happened in the studio in his own words, recounting how his sheet music fell to the floor mid-recording. "I did not want to stop and spoil the record which was moving along so wonderfully," he said. "So when I dropped the paper, I immediately turned back into the horn and started to scatting." He expected the take to be discarded. Instead, the engineers ran out of the control booth and told him: "Leave That In."

  "Heebie Jeebies" became a national bestseller, and from that moment, scatting became closely associated with Armstrong's name. The song's influence moved quickly. Cab Calloway modeled his 1930s scat solos on Armstrong's approach, and those solos in turn caught the ear of George Gershwin, who drew on the medium when composing his 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. A single studio accident, or so the story goes, found its way into a work for the operatic stage less than a decade later.

  The story Armstrong told is described in the source as possibly apocryphal. But whether or not the sheet music literally fell, the recording itself was real, and its effect on the musical landscape was immediate. What Armstrong demonstrated was that the voice, freed from the obligation to carry words, could function as an instrument in its own right, with the same improvisational range available to a trumpet or a saxophone.

• 4. Style and Syllable

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  Betty Carter tended toward soft-tongued sounds: "louie-ooie-la-la-la." Sarah Vaughan reached for fricatives, plosives, and open vowels: "shoo-doo-shoo-bee-ooo-bee." These were not arbitrary choices. The specific syllables a scat singer selects shape the pitch, articulation, coloration, and resonance of every note they produce.

  Ella Fitzgerald's scatting has been analyzed closely enough to reveal a structural pattern across all her performances of "How High the Moon": the same tempo each time, an opening chorus of the straight lyric, then a specialty chorus introducing the scat, then the scat itself. Will Friedwald compared this method to Chuck Jones directing his Roadrunner cartoons. Both used predetermined formulas, and both found ways to make those formulas feel like innovation. Fitzgerald's syllable choices also reflected the musical world she came from. Her improvisation mimics the sounds of the swing-era big bands with which she performed. Vaughan's, by contrast, echoes the bop-era small combos that accompanied her.

  Fitzgerald also used scat as a vehicle for musical quotation. In her 1960 live recording of "How High the Moon" in Berlin, she quoted more than a dozen songs, including "The Peanut Vendor," "Heat Wave," "A-Tisket, A-Tasket," and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." This technique, called using a compression, allows a performer to embed familiar melodies as a form of humor or commentary. Leo Watson, who performed before the canon of American popular music was firmly established, drew on nursery rhymes for the same effect.

• 5. Humor and the Voice

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  Cab Calloway exemplified what scat could do when pointed toward comedy rather than pure melody. His bandleader persona and his performances made him the central figure in demonstrating scat's humorous potential, and his approach influenced a generation of performers who followed.

  Slim Gaillard, Leo Watson, and Bam Brown took the comic angle further in their 1945 recording "Avocado Seed Soup Symphony," in which the singers scat variations on the single word "avocado" for most of the track. The piece is almost a conceptual joke, stretching one absurd word across a full musical performance.

  Not everyone in jazz approved of scat, humorous or otherwise. Writer and critic Leonard Feather once stated that scat singing, "with only a couple exceptions," should be banned. Significant vocalists shared his skepticism in practice: Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Jimmy Rushing, and Dinah Washington all avoided scat entirely throughout their careers. The same Leonard Feather who called for its ban also wrote the lyrics to the jazz song "Whisper Not," which Ella Fitzgerald then recorded on her 1966 Verve release of the same name.

• 6. Spread and Transformation

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  On the 26th of October 1927, Duke Ellington's Orchestra recorded "Creole Love Call" with Adelaide Hall singing wordlessly. Critics described Hall's vocals and evocative growls as functioning as "another instrument." The creativity behind the performance was shared: Ellington knew the kind of sound he wanted, but Hall was the one who could produce it. A year later, in October 1928, Ellington returned to the experiment in a version of "The Mooche," this time with Gertrude "Baby" Cox scatting after a muted trombone solo by Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton.

  During the Great Depression, The Boswell Sisters brought scat into new harmonic territory by scatting simultaneously, in harmony. Their version of "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" is one example. Ella Fitzgerald, as a young girl, spent hours imitating Connee Boswell's scatting, and critics have identified the Boswell Sisters' approach as a direct source for Fitzgerald's development.

  The bop era of the 1940s pushed vocal improvisation into greater complexity. Annie Ross, a bop singer, captured the mood of the moment: "The scat music was so exciting, everyone wanted to do it." The roster of singers working in the idiom during that period included Eddie Jefferson, Betty Carter, Anita O'Day, Joe Carroll, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Jon Hendricks, Babs Gonzales, Mel Torme, and Dizzy Gillespie.

  In the 1960s, Ward Swingle took scat in an entirely different direction. The product of an unusually liberal musical education, Swingle applied vocal improvisation to the works of Bach, forming The Swingle Singers. Scat also reached animated film in 1967, when Louis Prima and others used it in "I Wan'na Be Like You" for Disney's The Jungle Book.

• 7. Scat Beyond Jazz

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  Many hip hop artists use scat as a compositional tool before a single lyric is written. Tajai of Souls of Mischief described the process directly: "Sometimes my rhythms come from scatting. I usually make a scat kind of skeleton and then fill in the words." Rapper Tech N9ne has been recorded demonstrating the method, and gangsta rapper Eazy-E used it extensively in composing "Eazy Street."

  In the mid-1990s, jazz artist John Paul Larkin, known professionally as Scatman John, brought the practice to pop audiences in a way that had not happened before. He fused jazz singing with pop music and eurodance, scoring a worldwide hit with "Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop)" in 1994. The song briefly renewed broad public interest in the genre.

  Vocal bass, a distinct form of scat, is used specifically to simulate instrumental basslines, most often by bass singers in a cappella groups. Performers in this area include Bobby McFerrin, Al Jarreau, Reggie Watts, Tim Foust, Alvin Chea, and Avi Kaplan, among others. McFerrin's broader work has led observers to note that wordless singing has now traveled far from the concepts Louis Armstrong, Gladys Bentley, Cab Calloway, Anita O'Day, and Leo Watson first demonstrated.