When jazz singers “scat” they use the voice to improvise, making sounds that express the emotion of their music much like jazz instrumentalists create solos on a trumpet or trombone. Based on the African tradition of speaking out drum beats and on African-American “sound poetry,” scat singing evolved as an element of early 1900s ragtime. Jazz legend Louis Armstrong used scat, albeit not on purpose, in his 1926 song “Heebie Jeebies,” and Cab Calloway used humorous call-and-response scat (“Hi-dee hi-dee hi-dee hi”) in songs like “Minnie the Moocher.” Ella Fitzgerald was a scat master who simulated the sound of bebop Jazz solos throughout a career filled with virtuosic performances.
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