Scat Singing - Critical Assessment

Critical Assessment

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 destroying 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 what it mean". 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".

Various psychological and metaphysical theorists have instead proposed that vocal improvisation allows for revelations from the soul’s depths. Musician and lecturer Roberto Laneri has proposed a theory of improvisation based on "different states of consciousness" that draws on the Jungian model of the collective unconscious. The music stemming from Laneri’s improvisatory "consciousness expansion" tends to be vocal, as the voice is regarded as the "primal instrument".

Scat singing has never been universally accepted, even by jazz enthusiasts. Writer and critic Leonard Feather offers an extreme view: he once said that "scat singing—with only a couple exceptions—should be banned". Many of the finest jazz singers, including Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Jimmy Rushing, and Dinah Washington, have avoided scat entirely.