Description
The widely prevalent, but misleading origin story of Louis Armstrong giving birth to scat at a recording session in 1926 serves the function, for better or worse, of justifying our ignoring of a wide array of often racist or problematic proto-scat music from our histories of scat. Though this might be the most impactful intervention productive of questionable divisions of vocal jazz into scat and non-scat, it is certainly not the only one in scat’s history. This paper will intervene into dominant narratives of the history, value, and functions of scat and vocalise for the purpose of encouraging us to conceptualize a broader, contradictory view of what these jazz vocal forms have been and done. I will discuss Lindon Barrett’s notion of the binary between the singing and signing voice and argue that scat music has, at times, occupied both sides of this divide, variously functioning as institutionalized vocality that claims authority by Othering certain music as non-musical and marginalized vocality denied legibility by hegemonic musical norms. I will consider how scat as “signing voice” has worked to marginalize other forms of scat and I will point to some of the less-celebrated forms and functions of scat obscured by these exclusivist conceptions of the practice. These will include explorations of the scat existing before Armstrong’s “Heebie Jeebies” recording session; scat that served functions other than as virtuosic foreground; scat in the work of poets like Haki Madhubuti; and scat by some of the less-canonized singers of the past and present.Period | 4-Apr-2024 |
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Held at | Kunstuniversität Graz, Austria |
Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Voice
- Jazz