scat

scat, in music, jazz vocal style using emotive, onomatopoeic, and nonsense syllables instead of words in solo improvisations on a melody. Scat has dim antecedents in the West African practice of assigning fixed syllables to percussion patterns, but the style was made popular by trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong from 1927 on. The popular theory that scat singing began when a vocalist forgot the lyrics may be true, but this origin does not explain the persistence of the style. Earlier, as an accompanist to singers, notably the blues singer Bessie Smith, Armstrong played riffs that took on vocalization qualities. His scat reversed the process. Later scat singers fitted their styles, all individualized, to the music of their times. Ella Fitzgerald phrased her scat with the fluidity of a saxophone. Earlier, Cab Calloway became known as the “Hi-De-Ho” man for his wordless choruses. Sarah Vaughan’s improvisations included bebop harmonic advances of the 1940s. By the mid-1960s Betty Carter was exploiting extremes of range and flexibility of time similar to those of saxophonist John Coltrane. The vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross also phonetically imitated horn solos. In the 1960s the Swingle Singers recorded classical numbers using scat syllables but generally without improvisation.