Although not all jazz vocalists are practitioners, no vocal style is more closely associated with jazz singing than scat. Britannica Online defines scat as the use of "emotive, onomatopoeic, and nonsense syllables instead of words in solo improvisations on a melody." Scat singing allows vocalists to perform improvisations equivalent to instrumentalists-voice as instrument. At least one author, psychologist Jeff Pressing, has argued that scatting is more difficult than instrumental improvisation because it does not provide as much feedback for the performer to judge the quality of the output.
Although Louis Armstrong is often credited with inventing the style on his 1926 recording of "Heebie Jeebies," earlier examples of scatting were recorded. The story (likely apocryphal) as told by Armstrong is that his his music fell off the stand during the recording session, and not knowing the lyrics, in the best "necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention" developed the style on the spot.
Ask people to identify a singer who sang scat and the name Ella Fitzgerald will appear on an awful lot of lists. The next video is a 1969 performance of her rendition of Antonio Carlos Jobim's "One Note Samba." Her performance exemplifies two other qualities often associated with scatting: humor and quotations from other songs.
Ella began her career singing for the Chick Webb big band in the 1930's and many of her scat solos reflect the big band/swing influence. Sarah Vaughan's scat solos, on the other hand, are said to be more reflective of the later be bop style. Sarah's "Lullaby of Birdland" is from the great album she made with trumpeter Clifford Brown. Although she sings the song pretty straight at first, she starts trading riffs with the instrumentalists at about the 2:30 mark.
Scatting is usually an individual endeavor, but Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross turned it into a group effort. In case you somehow don't get the bop connection in the above video, you can't miss it in their rendition of Jon Henricks' "Everybody's Boppin'." Hold on to your hat and fasten your seatbelt.
Mel Torme was well-known for his scatting skills. Here he is near the end of his career with "Pick Yourself Up" in which he pays homage to Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, as well as J.S. Bach.
Torme was not the first to make the connection between Bach's instrumentals and scat. In the early 1960s Ward Swingle and his Swingle Singers recorded some vocal transcriptions of Bach's works, including one album titled Jazz Sebastian Bach.
A few generations of children have probably been introduced to scat singing via Louis Prima's "I Wanna Be Like You" from Disney's Jungle Book.
In case the Millennial Generation missed Louis Prima & The Jungle Book when they were kids they can still hear a little scat from their contemporary Amy Winehouse in her intro to "Stronger than Me" from her debut album, Frank.
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