Scat and Vocalese

Scat and vocalise are two approaches to jazz vocality. This essay intervenes into dominant narratives of their history, value, and functions and encourages us to conceptualize a broader, contradictory view of what they have been and done. This view both acknowledges the narrative of Louis Armstrong giving birth to scat in 1926 and that scat was widespread far earlier; it points to how scat has occupied both sides of Lindon Barrett’s binary of the singing/signing voice, variously functioning as institutionalized vocality that claims authority by Othering certain music as non-musical and marginalized vocality denied legibility by hegemonic musical norms. Alongside these reflections on the cultural politics of jazz voice, the reader is guided through explorations of the scat existing before scat; the less-celebrated recordings of the most-celebrated scat singer, Ella Fitzgerald; and the ways scat’s meanings are reshaped by poetry and by lesser-known singers of the past and present.