The Origins of Jazz Singing To 1950
The roots of jazz music were very much vocal, with field hollers and ceremonial chants, but while the blues maintained a strong vocal tradition, with singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith heavily influencing the progress of American popular music in general, early jazz bands only featured vocalists periodically, albeit those with a more "bluesy" tone of voice; one of the first "jazz" recordings, the 1917 Original Dixieland Jass Band recordings featured one Sarah Martin as vocalist.
It was Louis Armstrong who established singing as a distinct art form in jazz, realising that a singer could improvise in the same manner as instrumentalist, and establishing scat singing as a central pillar of the jazz vocal art.
A frequently repeated legend alleges that Louis Armstrong invented scat singing when he dropped the lyric sheet while singing on his 1926 recording of "Heebie Jeebies". This story is false and Armstrong himself made no such claim. Jazz musicians Don Redman, Cliff Edwards, and Red Nichols all recorded examples of scat earlier than Armstrong. However, the record "Heebie Jeebies" and subsequent Armstrong recordings introduced scat singing to a wider audience and did much to popularize the style. Armstrong was an innovative singer who while experimenting with all kinds of sound, improvised with his voice as he did on his instrument. In one famous example, Armstrong scatted a passage on "I'm A Ding Dong Daddy From Dumas" – he sings "I've done forgot the words!" in the middle of recording before taking off in scat.
The entrance of Billie Holiday into the world of jazz singing in the early 1930s was a revelation. She approached the voice from a radical angle, explaining, in her own words,
- I don't feel like I'm singing, I feel like I'm playing the horn.
Compared to other great jazz singers, Holiday had a rather limited vocal range of just over an octave. Where Holiday's genius lay, however, was to compensate for this shortcoming, with impeccable timing, nuanced phrasing, and emotional immediacy, qualities admired by a young Frank Sinatra.
With the end of prohibition in the United States, a more "danceable" form of jazz music arose, giving birth to the Swing era, and with it big bands such as those led by Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmie Lunceford, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw and Chick Webb. Many of the great post war jazz singers sang with these bands in the infancy of their careers.
With the end of the Swing era, the great touring Big bands of the past decade were no longer a viable option, and the demise of the typical big band singer was further complicated by the advent of be-bop as a creative force in jazz.
The rise of be-bop saw a new style of jazz singer, one who could match instrumentalists for sheer technical skill, and this was evident in Ella Fitzgerald’s rise to fame, the art of jazz singing was elevated to even higher rankings, allowing the notion of "free voice" to exist, giving instrumental qualities to the voice through timbres, registers and tessitura.
Read more about this topic: Vocal Jazz
Famous quotes containing the words origins, jazz and/or singing:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.”
—Imamu Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)
“His singing carried me back to the period of the discovery of America ... when Europeans first encountered the simple faith of the Indian. There was, indeed, a beautiful simplicity about it; nothing of the dark and savage, only the mild and infantile. The sentiments of humility and reverence chiefly were expressed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)