Вокальная импровизация в джазе: от скэт-вокала до бита

Vocal improvisation with wordless vocables, nonsense syllables or without words at all

Armstrong's "Heebie Jeebies" became a national bestseller and, consequently, the practice of scatting "became closely associated with Armstrong." On October 26, 1927, Duke Ellington's Orchestra recorded "Creole Love Call" featuring Adelaide Hall singing wordlessly. Hall's wordless vocals and "evocative growls" were hailed as serving as "another instrument." Although creativity must be shared between Ellington and Hall as he knew the style of performance he wanted, Hall was the one who was able to produce the sound. During the Great Depression, acts such as The Boswell Sisters regularly employed scatting on their records, including the high complexity of scatting at the same time, in harmony. An example is their version of "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." During this 1930s era, other famous scat singers included Scatman Crothers—who would go on to movie and television fame

Over the years, as jazz music developed and grew in complexity, scat singing did as well. During the bop era of the 1940s, more highly developed vocal improvisation surged in popularity.

Vocal bass is a form of scat singing that is intended to vocally simulate instrumental basslines that are typically performed by bass players. A technique most commonly used by bass singers in a cappella groups is to simulate an instrumental rhythm section, often alongside a vocal percussionist or beatboxer. Some notable vocal bass artists are Tim Foust, Adam Chance, Bobby McFerrin, Al Jarreau, Reggie Watts, Alvin Chea, Joe Santoni, Avi Kaplan, Matt Sallee, and Geoff Castellucci.

Many hip hop artists and rappers use scat singing to come up with the rhythms of their raps. Tajai of the group Souls of Mischief states the following in the book How to Rap: "Sometimes my rhythms come from scatting. I usually make a scat kind of skeleton and then fill in the words. I make a skeleton of the flow first, and then I put words into it." and gangsta rapper Eazy E used it extensively in his song "Eazy Street."

[[Image:Louis Armstrong restored. jpg|thumb|Paul Berliner has suggested that scat singing arose from instrumental soloists like Louis Armstrong (pictured) formulating jazz riffs vocally Dick Higgins likewise attributes scat singing to traditions of sound poetry in African American music. In West African music, it is typical to convert drum rhythms into vocal melodies; common rhythmic patterns are assigned specific syllabic translations. However, this theory fails to account for the existence—even in the earliest recorded examples of scatting—of free improvisation by the vocalist.) In this manner, soloists like Louis Armstrong became able to double as vocalists, switching effortlessly between instrumental solos and scatting.

Scat singing can allow jazz singers to have the same improvisational opportunities as jazz instrumentalists: scatting can be rhythmically and harmonically improvisational without concern about the lyric. Especially when bebop was developing, singers found scat to be the best way to adequately engage in the performance of jazz. Scatting may be desirable because it does not "taint the music with the impurity of denotation." Instead of conveying linguistic content and pointing to something outside itself, scat music—like instrumental music—is self referential and "d[oes] what it mean[s]." Through this wordlessness, commentators have written, scat singing can describe matters beyond words. Music critic Will Friedwald has written that Louis Armstrong's scatting, for example, "has tapped into his own core of emotion," releasing emotions "so deep, so real" that they are unspeakable; his words "bypass our ears and our brains and go directly for our hearts and souls."