[Video: a zebra teaches a little girl to scat-sing. Found it at Zooglobble, home of “kids’ music worth sharing.”
Warning: do not visit that site if you are even mildly distractable.]
My Dad taught me many things about music, especially jazz, even (I’m certain) in ways which I have yet to understand or even recognize. But on one point he was (I believe) mistaken:
We were watching Ella Fitzgerald on some variety-TV show; after pausing for a musical break by the band, all of a sudden she burst into this chain of nonsense syllables: Obba-dobba-DOO-dah, ba-dadda-da-doo-da-DOO… (or whatever). Her eyebrows waggled like Mexican jumping beans, and she smiled slyly. Dad burst out laughing. “She always does that,” he said, “when she forgets the words.”
Like I said, I think Dad was wrong about that (especially given how enthusiastically he welcomed instrumental improvisation). But singers who depart radically from the composed lyrics must brace themselves for the inevitable skepticism. Judges on televised singing competitions lose patience with contestants who forget the words to the songs they’re singing. I’ve seen such contestants (and woebegone karaoke’ers) freeze, lock up hopelessly, stuck in a loop of flickering blankness. They stammer, neurons misfiring; they’re like desperate smokers rummaging through a drawerful of out-of-gas cigarette lighters. Sometimes, you can see on their faces, they know it’s coming even before they get there: they take off at a wild dead run at a gap they know they won’t be able to cross — they gallop right up to the edge and leap, bursting out in something like charismatic glossolalia: Obba-dobba-DOO-dah…
Then their eyes dart from side to side as they smile, weakly, as though to convince the onlookers: I’m doing this on purpose, y’know. “Norwegian Wood” can always be improved by some good scat.
