Louis Armstrong's early scat solo analyzed for timbral organization

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Jazz Perspectives
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Louis Armstrong's Skid Dat De Dat: Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo
William Bauer Published online: 24 Apr 2008.
To cite this article: William Bauer (2007) Louis Armstrong's Skid Dat De Dat: Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo, Jazz Perspectives, 1:2, 133-165, DOI: 10.1080/17494060701611809 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060701611809
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Jazz Perspectives Vol. 1, No. 2, November 2007, pp. 133165
Louis Armstrongs Skid Dat De Dat: Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo
William Bauer
In one of the first and most influential examples of jazz musicology, the 1968 book Early Jazz, Gunther Schuller observes that Louis Armstrongs singing is just as natural and as inspired as his trumpet playing. Expanding on this point, Schuller writes: In his singing we can hear all the nuances, inflections, and natural ease of his trumpet playing, including even the bends and scoops, vibratos, and shakes.1 These remarks make an important point. That said, by describing Armstrongs singing as but a vocal counterpart of his playing, and by devoting all of the musical examples in the chapter to Armstrongs instrumental solos, Schuller adds weight to a bias in the literature that tilts the scholarship on jazz heavily toward instrumental music. Schuller might easily have reversed his comparisons direction. Consider the formative role singing played in Armstrongs musical development and career.2 Then think of the enormous impact that Armstrongs singing had on the jazz vocal idiom, on American popular culture, and, ultimately, on his international fame. In fact, Schuller does flip his instrumental/vocal comparison around elsewhere in the same chapter when he describes the trumpeters vibrato as a personal touch he undoubtedly acquired initially from his (and others) vocal techniques.3 Here Schuller reinforces a conclusion that many reach intuitively: Armstrong is singing through his horn playing.4 In fact, Armstrong placed no barrier between the two. He told Richard Hadlock in 1962: I figure playing and singing is the same.5 These and other clues suggest that Armstrongs singing can give us a key to understanding his work, both as a performer and as an instrumentalist. Yet, apart
Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 100. 2 Louis Armstrong, Swing That Music (New York: Longmans, Green, 1936; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 45, and Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 34. 3 By sustaining the ongoing feeling of restless activity that has impelled the line, so-called terminal vibrato keeps the phrase from coming to complete rest on a static note. However, I think Schullers general preoccupation with progress as an idealand, more specifically, with its significance in both the jazz aesthetic and in jazz historylead him to portray swing inaccurately as goal-directed movement. For more on how change operates on all levels of music to create movement, see Jan LaRue, Guidelines for Style Analysis, 2nd ed. (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1992), 142143. 4 See, for example, Scotty Barnhardt, The World of Jazz Trumpet: A Comprehensive History and Practical Philosophy (New York: Hal Leonard, 2005), 25. 5 Joshua Berrett, ed. The Louis Armstrong Companion: Eight Decades of Commentary (New York: Schirmer Books, 1999), 2526. ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17494060701611809
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134 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo
from a recent article by Benjamin Givan, the literature contains no substantial analyses of Louis Armstrongs vocal work.6 In this respect, Armstrong has not been singled out. Theorists have shown a remarkable lack of curiosity about jazz singers and about the particular techniques jazz singers use to give shape to their interpretations.7 (Despite the fact that audiences clearly prefer vocalists, singers also have an especially low standing in the subculture of performers.) My interest in expressive musical performance, by singers and instrumentalists alike, as well as the paucity of research on the craft of jazz vocalism, has led me to investigate the work of singers such as Billie Holiday and Betty Carter who have sustained and enlivened the jazz tradition. In order to get down to the roots of that tradition, which ultimately grew into a tree of many branches, I am now studying the work of a vocalist widely credited with planting the seeds. Yet, for all the musical offspring Pops spawned, no one could mistake the unique tone color of Louis Armstrongs voice for that of another singer. Among jazz musicians, tone color has always figured prominently as both an expressive and a technical concern. The wide array of stylistic idioms that fall under the umbrella term jazz all have in common a distinctiveindeed, a highly personalapproach to tone. Writers routinely note the integral role timbre plays in jazz and other musical styles that have roots in African American and African cultures. Moreover, numerous descriptions of African American musical expression, from its earliest forms to the present, prove that black musicians and their imitators have historically explored timbre and have used expressive timbral qualities in ways that have generally been off limits to so-called legitimate musicians. Recently dubbed Americas classical music, and ensconced at Lincoln Center and in university music departments, jazz has, in many ways, gone legit. So it is easy to forget that, when it first emerged, this quintessentially African American expression
6 See Benjamin Givan, Duets for One: Louis Armstrongs Vocal Recordings, The Musical Quarterly 87 (Summer 2004): 188218. Indeed, for all the well-deserved praise Armstrong receives, and in light of his widely acknowledged influence on the Swing era, music theorists have not yet found an effective way to analyze his music. In an unpublished article I have recently written, Speaking in Tones: Louis Armstrongs Hotter Than That, I have put forth some reasons why Armstrongs entire body of work, vocal and instrumental, has not attracted more attention among theorists. In this same essay, I also offer a mode of analysis that can address this problem. 7 In addition to a couple of doctoral dissertations (Katherine Cartwright, Quotation and Reference in Jazz Performance: Ella Fitzgeralds St. Louis Blues, 19571979 [Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1998], and Lara Pellegrinelli, The Song Is Who? Beyond Doubleness in Mainstream, Contemporary Jazz Singing [Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2005]), one can find a mere handful of articles in this area: Richard Rodney Bennett, The Technique of the Jazz Singer, Music and Musicians, February 1972, no pages (reissued in Jazz: A Century of Change, ed. Lewis Porter [New York: Schirmer, 1997], 5767); Hao Huang and Rachel Huang, Billie Holiday and Tempo Rubato: Understanding Rhythmic Expressivity, Annual Review of Jazz Studies 7 (199495): 181199; Milton Stewart, Stylistic Environment and the Scat Singing Styles of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, Jazzforschung/Jazz Research 19 (1987): 6176. In addition, see Robert Cogan, New Images of Musical Sound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 3538, Barry Kernfeld, What to Listen for in Jazz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 16768, and Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 19301945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 527546. Each of these latter sources have passages devoted to the analysis of Billie Holidays singing.
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contrasted as sharply with Western European art music as the color black stands out against white. Contemporary accounts of early jazz give the impression that, of the features of the music that scared jazz outsiders most, musicians timbral explorationsespecially those of singersdid so most of all. James D. Hart implied as much when he wrote in 1932: [One] would swear the songs could not issue from the human throat but must have come from some tortured instrument; yet these fierce screechings, these perverse tones, these maddening inflections, are considered nothing short of indispensable.8 Hart paints a vivid portrait of the scat singer as an untalented sensationalist and a threat to civilization:
In hot jazz much of our popular vocal music depends upon the instrumentation of sounds, i.e., upon the vocalization of pleasingly barbaric noises. It is not uncommon for whole choruses to be sung without words, but it is unusual if a hot jazz singer does not interpolate his own leering, raucous noises into some inoffensive and self-respecting chorus. In the occasional chorus which [sic] is sung with all its words, the singer is bound to repeat the melody the second time with an ungodly imitation of musical instruments as divinely insane as the human larynx will permit. Wordless mimicry of well-known sounds arouses the blood of listeners to say this is hot stuff. Ukulele Ikes come into existence, not because they can sing, but because they can make weird and terrifying noises. Any unorthodox instrumentation is fair if it will create heat. Horrible shrieks, oily moans, and staccato screams will set the blood boiling and give the singer a reputation for being hot.9
Harts use of such oxymoronic expressions as divinely insane and pleasingly barbaric sends a strangely mixed message. Yet, in describing jazz vocal improvisation as horrible shrieks, oily moans, and staccato screams, he leaves little doubt about his feelings toward these leering, ungodly noises. Hart is not the only contemporary writer who portrays jazz in condescending and xenophobic hues. But he seems especially scandalized, not only by the sounds in themselves, not only by the scat singers violation of the composers self-respecting song, but also, and mainly, by the close link between scat singing and instrumental improvisation as if the hot physicality of the singing and the hot emotions it stirs up in listeners were somehow shameful or dirty. Fortunately, the musicians had no difficulty scaling the imaginary wallbetween the composed and the improvised, the instrumental and the vocalthat Hart and others erected in their minds in order to hold back the tide of fierce screechings, perverse tones, and maddening inflections. So far, however, jazz scholars have not even been able to get a leg up on this wall. Harts diatribe, in all its grotesqueness, suggests one key assumption that may be discouraging theorists from studying jazz vocal improvisation. They find scat singing hard to take seriously. Thus, while musicologists may not necessarily rank it with
8 James D. Hart, Jazz Jargon, American Speech 7 (April 1932): 247. Harts article appeared not so long after Louis Armstrong had popularized scat singing, but several years before Hart became Professor of American Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. 9 Ibid. Emphasis in the original.
such novelty acts as the instrumental imitation of barnyard animals, they have yet to give any indication that this practice warrants scholarly investigation. This paper shows that, apart from any intrinsic aesthetic value it may or may not havea discussion I will not take up herescat singing offers an excellent source of acoustical data about the relationship between vocal and instrumental improvisation in the jazz idiom. Absent the extra-referential power of the word, scat singing shares with instrumental music the non-verbal character of so-called absolute music. Situated in the boundary waters between song and instrumental music, and often borrowing elements from both realms, scat singing opens a window onto jazz performance practice in general and onto jazz phrasing and articulation in particular. Moreover, because the jazz aesthetic places a high premium on developing a sound that listeners can recognize immediately as the performers owna sound as distinctive as that of the performers own voicethe rich timbral possibilities of the human voice have special relevance for anyone studying the techniques that jazz musicians use to give voice to their own personal style. Indeed, the voice enjoys the widest timbral range of all instruments. With this instrument, scat singers create a chiaroscuro of timbral contrasts that generates smalldimension movement. This movement, in turn, sustains the solos narrative, its drama-in-miniature. The pitches of a scat solo sung throughout on one syllable, such as /la/, would be exactly the same. Yet the solo would sound very differentand much the poorer, I thinkin its lack of timbral variety and in the lesser roles of phrasing, articulation, and accentuation. In the absence of the lexical meaning that listeners get from song lyrics, these factors sustain listeners interest in the scat singers absolute music. Furthermore, timbre and its shaping impact on phrasing, articulation, and accentuation helps experienced listeners (i.e., those who are attuned to the way a jazz solo can tell a story) make sense of vocal and instrumental performers musical ideas. Without drawing attention to itself, timbre covertly leads the listeners attention to relationships between such ideas, which often occur in disparate moments of his or her real-time musical experience. The slyness of this process may explain why pitch typically gets most of the credit for creating structural relationships among musical ideas. Yet musical ideas hang together as much because of the power that phrasing, articulation, accentuation, and timbre have to create associations among them (the same kinds of associations that listeners use without conscious awareness to make sense of spoken language) as they do because of syntactical relationships between pitch sequences. Imagine the pitches of any instrumental composition performed with no phrasing, articulation, accentuation, and timbral contrast. Would a works syntactical logic emerge from such a bland procession of sounds? From Harts caricature, it is easy to tell that jazz musicians of the time considered timbre important. As such, one might expect this area to hold special interest to scholars who write about the music. Yet we in the profession have still not reached any agreement about the best ways to grapple with this aspect of the music. Lacking a systematic approach, scholars have been unable to probe very far beneath the surface impressions that one forms of things exotic. An aspect of music that jazz musicians
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handle with ease and assurance remains hidden in murky waters simply because writers find it too slippery to grasp. Benjamin Givan has suggested that one of the factors that has deterred theorists from discussing Armstrongs (and by extension, other artists) singing has been musical notations inability to represent the subtle melodic inflections and timbral effects that characterize it.10 This idea should be taken a step further. In order to capture this elusive aspect of music, we will need to create new analytic tools, ones which magnify the details of timbre left in shadow by standard critical/analytical methods. Because the musicians consider timbre of prime importance, the literature about jazz requires a comprehensive treatment of timbre. Moreover, jazz scholarship must find an effective way of relating the jazz improvisers timbral production (the phonemic aspect) to the listeners timbral experience (the phonetic aspect). To fill this void, I have borrowed the theoretical apparatus and the symbols that applied linguists use to represent and analyze speech sounds. For readers unfamiliar with this field, this paper provides a brief overview of the most relevant theoretical ideas. Following that overview, an analysis of one of Louis Armstrongs vocal performances shows how this particular branch of linguistics can give us a richer understanding of the technical resources at this singers disposal. The analysis includes such details as the role of the tongues position in creating timbral variation in speech and in song, in order to show how Armstrongs vocal technique relates to the acoustical result that delights the ear. Despite my methodologys unusual aspects, I hope that its fundamental premises will seem intuitively clear. Anyone who speaks American English can distinguish among the vowel sounds Louis Armstrong sings, for example. The method I offer below radiates outward from these premises to shed light on Armstrongs vocal technique. In the process, this discussion guides listeners through the complexities of the deceptively simple jazz vocal improvisation Armstrong wrought on Skid Dat De Dat. Given that musical analysis commonly highlights pitch, the sustained focus on timbre here may astonish some readers. But by beginning without reference to standard musical notation (which leads backward into listening habits that privilege pitch organization), I hold melodic and harmonic considerations at bay until later in the paper and thereby keep timbre in the spotlight. I invite readers to join me in seeing the data I have gathered from Louis Armstrongs singing on Skid Dat De Dat in a new light and, more important, in hearing the music in a fresh way. One other premise buttresses my argument: beyond obvious differences in sound that distinguish one instrument from anotherand beyond the surface idiomatic technical virtues and limitations of any given instrument, including the voiceno difference in aesthetic worth separates music made on one instrument from that made on any other, or singing from playing an instrument. On first reading, this statement may not seem so surprising. However, this idea has not gained widespread acceptance in the jazz world. For example, in a panel discussion with Nat Hentoff
10
Givan, Duets for One, 190.
published by Playboy magazine in 1964, the saxophonist Julian Cannonball Adderley expressed a commonly held viewpoint:
I dont know just what [a] jazz singer is. What does the term mean? Weve had our Billie Holidays, Ella Fitzgeralds, and Mildred Baileys, and Sarah Vaughns [sic], but theyve been largely jazz oriented and jazz associated. Any real creative jazz innovation has been done by an instrumentalist. In other words, to me, jazz is an instrumental music, so that, although Ill go along with a term like jazz oriented, I dont recognize a jazz singer as such.11
In this article, the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan concurs, adding that improvising with a rhythm on a song, or improvising on a progression, is instrumental.12 I find it startling that Adderleywhose many talents did not include innovationcan belittle so blithely the work of four women who have enriched the jazz vocabulary so much. His emphasis on innovation here suggests that, for him, contributing to progressrather than, say, passing a legacy on to succeeding generations constitutes a defining criterion of the jazz performer. If one were to accept this view, then the work of many singers and instrumentalists might not seem to warrant serious attention. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with Adderley on this point, however, the expressive force of Louis Armstrongs vocal technique, and the widespread impact his singing had on musicians and listeners, belie the notion that the human voice can neither produce jazz nor innovate. In going beyond many of the technical limitations that set one expressive modality apart from the other, Armstrong was guided by and affirming an aesthetic principle that informed the jazz idiom he so brilliantly mastered. As he himself put it, playing and singing is the same.13 Skid Dat De Dat: A Primer of Jazz Vocal Technique The Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings open a window onto the time when Louis Armstrong was rapidly establishing his fame as a soloist and extending his influence. In numerous oral histories, musician after musician has borne witness to the enduring effect these recordings had on the generation that made jazz Americas popular music. Any sample of Armstrongs work on these recordings (his earliest as leader) would serve to illustrate the techniques Armstrong used to craft his performances. Here, I focus on Skid Dat De Dat because it exposes specific scat techniques in their most basic form. Armstrong and His Hot Five recorded this tune for the OKeh label in Chicago on November 16, 1926. Credited to composer Lil Hardin, who also plays piano on the recording, Skid Dat De Dat follows a
11
Julian Cannonball Adderley, as quoted in Keeping Time, ed. Robert Walser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 27980. The source of the original article is Nat Hentoff with Julian Cannonball Adderley, Dave Brubeck, John Dizzy Gillespie, Ralph J. Gleason, Stan Kenton, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, George Russell, and Gunther Schuller, The Playboy Panel: Jazz Today and Tomorrow, Playboy, February 1964, 2931, 3438, 56, 58, and 13941. 12 Ibid. 13 Emphasis added.
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non-standard 22-bar AABA form.14 Example 1 maps out the basic form on which the Hot Five built their improvisations. The basic forms unusual length comes from its six-measure A sections, which split into two unequal parts: two measures of unaccompanied soloingbreaks marked NC (No Chord) in Example 1followed by a four-measure, hymn-like phrase.15 The alternation of the A sections solo breaks and ensemble chorales, on the one hand, and the bridges polyphonic uniting of melody and harmony, on the other, gives the tune its unusual formal design. The tune is not a blues, per se. But its calland-response format, plaintive mood, and melodic idiom, as well as the move to the subdominant at the start of the tunes bridge, all give it a decidedly blue flavor. By inserting unaccompanied solos before each ensemble passage, Hardin may have been building off of a sixteen-bar format. In order to show how this idea works, I have aligned the four-measure bridge vertically with the four-measure ensemble passages in Example 1, rather than with the rests left in the form for each solo break. The musicians breaks always spill past these unaccompanied measures into the first measure of the ensuing ensemble passages. This feature further adds to the tunes irregular character by creating three-measure phrases that each dovetail with the following phrase. With so much formal irregularity built into the tune itself, the chorus structure of the performance does not make itself readily apparent to the ear. As we will see, specific features of the performance also make it hard for a listener to grasp the form on first hearing. Indeed, Armstrongs opening unaccompanied solo strikes the ear so
Example 1 Skid Dat De Dat, 22-bar AA9BA0 form.

The reader can find any number of reissues of Skid Dat De Dat, OKeh 8436 (rec. November 16, 1926). See, for example, Louis Armstrong: The Complete Hot Fives and Hot Seven Recordings, Columbia/ Legacy 82876828502, 2000, compact disc. This recording is also available online as a RealAudio streaming file at www.redhotjazz.com, an invaluable archive of hundreds of early jazz recordings. 15 In Louis Armstrong and Paul Whiteman: Two Kings of Jazz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 74, Joshua Berrett observed that the melodic line of this ensemble passage resembles the fournote motto from the fourth movement of Mozarts Jupiter Symphony. That said, this similarity alone does not establish Mozarts work as the source for this idea.
14
Table 1 Skid Dat De Dat, call and response in arrangement of timbres.

CHORUS I II III IV Coda: Vcl./ens. 2:453:01 A (mm. 16) call/response Tpt./ens. 0:000:12 Cl./ens 0:440:56 Vcl./cl.+ens. 1:271:38 Tbn./tpt.+ens. 2:112:22 A9 (mm.712) call/response Tpt./ens. 0:120:25 Pno./tpt.+ens. 0:561:08 Vcl./tbn.+ens. 1:381:51 Tbn./tpt.+ens. 2:222:34 B (mm.1316) Ensemble 0:250:33 Ensemble 1:081:16 Cl.+ens. 1:511:58 Ensemble 2:342:42 A0 (mm.1722) call/response Tbn./ens. 0:330:44 Cl./tpt.+ens. 1:161:27 Vcl./cl.+ens. 1:582:11 Tpt./ens. 2:422:54
strongly as an introduction, the Armstrong historian/discographer Edward Brooks does not include it in the arrangements chorus structure. Arguing that the short sections are so disparate that the work can just as well be considered as a collection of brief passages, he allows that the way he has braced together these passages in his overview of the arrangements structure is not the only possible division of the composition.16 The visual representation of the form in Table 1 helps the eye to grasp relationships between underlying form and performance that might elude the unaided ear. Changes in instrumental timbre influence the way one hears the performance, which consists of four reiterations of the form. In the opening chorus, at the first two measures of the A section (0:000:06), Armstrong sets up the tunes call-andresponse format by performing the first break. His break in A9 (0:120:18) helps to reinforce this format. However, after the bridge, at the start of A0 (0:330:37), Kid Ory plays instead. By defying an expectation the experienced listener brings to a jazz arrangement, that the entrance of a fresh instrumental timbre will usually signal the beginning of a new chorus, the trombone entrance here disrupts the orderly procession of solos. The next chorus features other soloists on the breaks: Johnny Dodds in the first A section (0:440:49), Lil Hardin in the repeat at A9 (0:561:01), and Johnny Dodds again in the last one, A0 (1:161:20). These alternations bring to mind the way that trading fours in a blues can sometimes superimpose a hypermetric cross-rhythm on the form. This impression offers further evidence that the musicians may have had a modified blues in mind. In that genre, well-established conventions give the experienced listener a foothold on the way that the solos interact with the underlying form. However, the unusual sequence of solo breaks here occurs before the performance can establish the tunes formwhich, as we have seen, does not even conform to a standard format in itself.
16
Edward Brooks, The Young Louis Armstrong on Records: A Critical Survey of the Recordings, 19231928 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 343.
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In the second chorus, Armstrong amplifies the procedure of making irregularly spaced entrances. In response to the clarinet break at the top of the form (0:44), the ensemble performs the homophonic answer (0:480:56), as before. However, in the A9 section (0:561:08), Armstrong solos over the chorale-like texture. The introduction of a new line here generates small-dimension movement. But as with Orys unexpected entrance in the first chorus (0:330:37), the introduction of a new instrumental timbre here obscures the underlying chorus structure. During the A0 section (1:161:27), after the bridge, Armstrong solos again over the ensemble response to the break. This moment recalls his earlier passage and he subtly adds variations that build on it. In reaching back to material heard before the bridge, this passage sustains the musics middle-dimension growth. The sequence of entrances in the next chorus (1:272:11) makes the form somewhat more audible, largely because Armstrongs vocal breaks follow a more predictable course. Indeed, the scat solos relative stability in relation to the form makes it an oasis of clarity after the shifting formal designs created by earlier entrances. This chorus also stands out in that, whereas each of the other choruses B sections featured the full group playing the well-known collective texture of the New Orleans style, in the third chorus, Johnny Dodds solos over rhythm section accompaniment during the bridge (at 1:511:58). In this chorus, Armstrong sets all three of the A phrases in motion with scat vocal breaks (at 1:271:32, 1:381:44, and 1:582:04). Johnny Dodds, Kid Ory, and, after the bridge, Dodds again, each answer him in turn (at 1:311:38, 1:431:51, and 2:032:11, respectively). The latter sequence of responses balances out the pattern of breaks introduced in chorus II, in which Dodds initiated the first and last A sections (IIA and IIA0). In soloing after Armstrongs first and last breaks, it is as if Dodds is filling in structural gaps that he had created in the second chorus by playing breaks in parallel sections of the form. Continuing in this vein, the last chorus (2:112:54) complements the first one, with Kid Ory taking the first two breaks (2:112:15 and 2:222:27) and Armstrong taking the last (2:422:47). From a timbral standpoint, the arrangement forms an arch-like structure, with the order of calls and responses turning back on themselves halfway through the performance. In the last chorus, however, Armstrong picks up where he had left off in chorus II, when he soloed over the ensemble responses to the breaks in sections A9 and A0. This approach continues the growth process he had initiated during those earlier passages. Moreover, he now intensifies this process by responding to each trombone break with increasing movement. Mirroring the structure of entrances in chorus II, Armstrong solos over the ensemble passages in the IVA and IVA9 sections of the form. Consistent with his narrative approach, he has saved the liveliest solo for the break after the bridge in the last chorus. The recording ends with a short scat coda that gives Armstrong the last word. Despite the apparently fragmentary aspect of the soloing that Armstrong (and everyone else) delivers, broken up as it is among the various calls and responses he performs throughout the recording, Armstrong succeeds in projecting an arc of largedimension growth that runs from the trumpet question that launches the performance to the vocal answer that brings the performance home. Amid all of
the structural ambiguities, Armstrongs instrumental and vocal passagesespecially the unaccompanied onesprovide an invaluable primer on how to use timbral variation to tell a story. What kind of story does this music tell? Each listener will have a somewhat different answer to this question, based not only on the personal resonance that the music has for him or her, but also based on his or her prior experience with the traditions to which the music alludes. Through Armstrongs rhetorical delivery, which suggests that the storys emotional trajectory started well before the musics first note sounds, Armstrong urges listeners to reach beyond the musics structure into black American cultures rich heritage. One may feel that, by evoking the New Orleans second-line tradition, Skid Dat De Dat celebrates life in all of its impermanence and bears witness to the parade of souls who are marching through it. Another may feel that, in tapping into the blues idiom, this music tells of a healing release from the chains of sorrow. Thus, while we cannot collapse into one simple explanation the complex layers of feeling that the story calls forth, neither can we take lightly the storys plea to identify withindeed, to empathize withthe teller. The music leaves haunting traces in the ears and in the heart, sustaining its emotional trajectory long after the final chord has faded. Precisely because the human voice has the power to carry verbal meaning, the vocal solo (in its wordless eloquence) reaches especially deeply into that ineffable place of the spirit that literal meaning cannot reach. Armstrong touches this place from the outset by setting in motion an array of musical forces. The confluence of these forces forms a whole that is greater than the sum of its rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, dynamic, and timbral parts. In order to observe how timbre may affect the listeners experience of Armstrongs vocal solo, I have isolated it in Example 2. The example shows Armstrongs scat lyrics transcribed phonetically and the phrase structure of each break mapped out spatially in relation to the meter (the numbers at the top of the example refer to beats of the measure). By inference, then, it also shows how Armstrong handles the timbre of scat syllables as a formal element and how he coordinates timbre with rhythm. By providing a chart of the sonic traces left in the minds ear after the solo has ended, this example allows the reader to survey Armstrongs scat solo in chorus III all at once, or synchronically. Insofar as the chart aids the listeners reconstruction and
Example 2 Skid Dat De Dat, Chorus III, phonetic transcription of scat vocal breaks.
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recognition of patterns in the music, it can add to his or her aural grasp of Armstrongs musical logic and enhance the listening process. When read from left to right, the figure shows the timing of each scat syllable (commonly called vocables by linguists) by graphing the way Armstrong situates it in the flow of time. The placement of each vocables initial consonant in relation to the barlines and beat numbers at the top of the page, and the presence or absence of a horizontal line after each vocable, indicate the vocables beginning, sustain, and ending in relation to the musics 4/4 meter and the musical pulse, which generally moves at a pace of 120122 beats per minute. From Example 2, we can gain an understanding of the mechanisms by which Louis Armstrong executed certain actionsthe timing of the release, flow, and interruption of his air stream, for exampleto produce the initiation, continuation, and cessation of his vocal tone. This example illustrates how, even without the rhythmic support of accompanying instruments, Armstrong set all of his actions in relation to an entrained temporal grid provided by the implicit beat and meter. In so doing, the example provides a visual analogy for the ways in which Armstrong interacted with the beatat times reinforcing the beat by aligning with it; at other times tugging at the beat by avoiding it. In depicting syncopations iconically, the spatial rhythmic notation of Example 2 reveals a paradoxical rule of African and African American improvised ensemble music: share the storytelling, either by leaving gaps for others to fill (for instance, the rests left in the form for breaks) or by filling in the gaps others have left (the breaks themselves). In any given musical passage, this principle may be operating on several rhythmic levels at once. Thus in the middle dimension, or at the hypermetric level, each of Armstrongs entrances jumps out anacrusically from the dead spot at the end of each of the preceding phrases, creating continuity through complementarity. In the smallest dimension of his scat breaks, Armstrong alternates between the two roles. First, he cuts against the groove by filling implied gaps between ictuses (in timekeeping, the successive moments when a tapping foot hits the floor). Then, as he brings each phrase to a close, he reasserts the groove (which the band then makes explicit). Edward Brooks claims that the four vocal breaks are more uniform in their dramatic content than are [Armstrongs] horn breaks.17 I would shift the emphasis here and argue that all of the vocal breaks move Armstrongs narrative along with melodic, rhythmic, and timbral variations on a core expressive idea. But after the bridge, when Armstrong initiates his last break (phrase IIIA0 at 1:58), he also echoes structural features of his first vocal break. These references round out the songs AABA logic and thereby reveal the whole cloth that he has been weaving together, thread by thread, from separate melodic strands. In order to examine the role timbre plays in lacing the structural fabric with interwoven colors, we need to formulate a tone-color wheel.
17
Ibid., 343.
Timbre: Vocal Production and Auditory Reception As the music theorists Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot have observed, a particularly rich use of the tone-color resources of one common instrument, the human voice, is to be found in spoken language. Each vowel can be regarded as a particular tone color with a specific formant region. Spectrographs depict formants as bands of intensity. These bands highlight specific partials of the overtone series that a speaker or singer amplifies in producing each vowels distinctive acoustical structure. Formants interest us here because they link the singers production of vocal timbre (the phonemic aspect) with the listeners experience of it (the phonetic aspect). Formants give us a way to measure the differences between vowels, and, therefore, between timbres. Cogan and Escot add that although spectra of men, women, and children for a given vowel are different, the formants are not; formants are maintained even in whispers.18 Citing the physicists Fritz Winckel and Hermann von Helmholz, the authors go on to provide a spectral scale of darkness and lightness, based upon the formant frequency of each vowel sound.19 In Example 3, I have reproduced that scale, using Trager-Smith phonemes instead of IPA symbols.20
Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot, Sonic Design: The Nature of Sound and Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976), 457459. 19 Ibid., 458. See also Fritz Winckel, Music, Sound and Sensation (New York: Dover Publications, 1967), 14, and Hermann Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, trans. Alexander Ellis (New York: Dover Publications; reprint of 2nd English ed., 1954), 95. I have converted the phonemes on the original Cogan/Escot list to the Trager-Smith (T-S) system of phonetic transcription. To that list, Cogan and Escot add the sounds /u/ and / /, which Winckel omitted. In addition, Cogan and Escot point out that even consonantsdespite a noise-like character that derives from their indefinite fundamental pitch and the complexity of their waveformhave general pitch characteristics, with some producing a relatively high or low frequency band or a relatively broad or narrow band. 20 In their book, An Outline of English Structure (Norman, OK: Battenburg Press, 1951), George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith, Jr., devised a system for representing the vowels and consonants of the English language. Applied linguists and phonologists still consider this system a viable method of phonetic transcription. I have several reasons for using this system instead of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). First, Armstrongs vocal technique grows out of his American English pronunciation, and specifically American-South and African American dialects. Because Armstrongs repertoire includes songs in the English language, the T-S phonemes provide a foundation for ongoing applications of the method to his performances of material from the American Songbook. Second, the T-S phonemes provide a correlation between the symbol used to show brightness and darkness and the production of these acoustical features. Thus, the presence of a /y/ phoneme in a vowel (such as in the /iy/ of beat) indicates that the speaker pronounces the vowel with a spreading of the lips. Likewise, the phoneme /w offers a graphic corollary for the speakers rounding of the lips in the vowel /uw/ of boot. See also Molly Sheridan, In Conversation with William Bauer, The New Music Box (June 2002), http:// www.newmusicbox.net/article.nmbx?id53822 (accessed July 29, 2007), and the following essays and book by William Bauer: All of Me: The Role of Timbre in Louis Armstrongs Reinvention of an American Popular Song, in the Online Proceedings of the Colloque Interdiscipliaire de Musicologie, lObservatoire International de la Creation Musicale, lUniversite de Montreal, http://www.oicm.umontreal.ca/cim05/cim05_articles/BAUER_W_CIM05.pdf (accessed July 29, 2007); Scat Singing: A Timbral and Phonemic Analysis, Current Musicology 64 (2003): 303323; Open the Door: The Life and Music of Betty Carter (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002); and Billie Holiday and Betty Carter: Emotion and Style in the Jazz Vocal Line, Annual Review of Jazz Studies 6 (1993): 99 151.
18
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Example 3 Timbral scale of vowel sounds.
Example 3 shows the vowels of the English language arranged in a sequence of rising steps. By marking an increase in brightness with each step, this stairway provides a relative measure of the timbres a listener perceives when he or she hears stable vowels. Viewed in this way, the phonemes function phonetically; they give us a broad or descriptive notation of speech and song as acoustical phenomena.21 For a vowel to be experienced by a listener, it must have resulted from the action of some kind of vocal apparatus (of a person speaking or singing, for example) or the simulation of such action (by the synthesized voice you hear when you phone Amtrak). The reader may therefore also interpret the symbols in Example 3 phonemically. That is, these symbols may be interpreted as a narrow or prescriptive notation: a vocalistic tablature of sorts that suggests how one may produce each distinct sound. Working with phonetic data gathered from the recording and transcribed manually, I will make inferences about the vocal techniques that Armstrong used to craft his sonic raw materials into the scat solo on Skid Dat De Dat.
21
See Charles Seeger, Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-Writing, The Musical Quarterly 44 (April 1958): 184195, and Alexander John Ellis, Francis James Child, William Salesbury, Alexander Barclay, Johann Andreas Schmeller, and Johan Winkler, On Early English Pronunciation, with Special Reference to Shakespeare and Chaucer (issued jointly by the Philological Society, the Early English Text Society, and the Chaucer Society; appearing as no. 1, 45, 11, 25 in the second series of the publications of the Chaucer Society, no. 2, 7, 14, 23, 56, in extra series of the publications of the Early English Text Society and without number in the Philological Society Publications. Published for the Philological Society by Asher and Co. and for the Early English Text Society and the Chaucer Society, by Tru bner and Co., 1869; reprint, Kraus Reprints and Periodicals (February 1972).
Those of us who have not had the benefit of voice lessons rarely notice the exquisite command we exert over our own vocal apparatus when forming a verbal utterance. Nor do we typically notice the remarkable sensitivity to timbral nuances we have developed in order to interpret spoken communication. In order to master vocal technique, however, singers must pay attention to, and refine, these qualities. The process involves the fine-tuning of skills that most human beings, as competent speakers of their native language, take for granted. Because linguistic skills typically operate on a subliminal level for most peopleindeed, these skills must operate so, in order for us to convey and grasp meaning in real timelisteners might not notice the ways in which scat singers transform these skills into a powerful expressive tool. By researching this area, I hope to extend our listening technique enough to render audible important aspects of Armstrongs vocal performance that normally happen too quickly to notice. Consider the physical skill involved in producing the timbral differences between the words do /duw/ and Dad /dd/, for example, or the words deed /diyd/ and dot /dat/. In order to generate the acoustical differences that enable an attentive listener to tell which of the above words has been spoken, a speaker must control the factors that influence the flow of air as it carries sound vibrations through the vocal apparatus, adjusting the tongues position in the mouth and the shape of the lips. To communicate effectively, then, a speaker must exert an extremely nuanced (albeit spontaneous) control over timbreas non-native speakers discover when they are learning to speak a new language.22 An understanding of the vocal technique Armstrong used to produce scat solos (such as the one represented in Example 2) can enhance our appreciation of his work as a singer and as an improviser. Moreover, this understanding can give us the specific tools we need in order to go beyond general impressions, thereby enabling us to analyze concretely the impact that Armstrong had on other singers and on other improvisers. Voice teachers remind their students constantly that a vocalist must transform his or her body into a musical instrumentor as Cogan and Escot suggest, into several instruments. As with all other musical instruments, physical movements effect changes in the mechanisms that produce differences in amplitude, duration, frequency, and timbre. Most of these movements take place within the body, thus rendering a singers technique largely invisible to the listener. Unless a singer has some trouble with vocal production, for example, we rarely notice that his or her tongue is producing two different fundamental kinds of movement: up-down (moving between the jaw and the upper palate); and, forward-back (moving between the teeth and the back of the throat). Table 2 charts the different tongue and lip articulations used in vowel production.
22
In the following discussion, I have relied heavily on Wayne Slawsons careful analysis of the ways speakers modify vocal color in his book Sound Color (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 85 ff. Taking his cue from the research on vowels, Slawson assumes that sound color is primarily a function of the first two resonances [or formant frequencies]. In so doing, he virtually identifies sound color, a particular facet of the general category of timbre, with vocal color or timbre.
Jazz Perspectives Table 2 Stable English-language vowels.

Tongues Articulation High High Mid Mid Low Mid Low Mid Mid High High Front Front Front Front Front Center Center Back Back Back Back Lips Articulation Spread_______ Neutral Spread_______ Neutral Neutral Neutral Neutral Neutral Round_______ Neutral Round_______ Phoneme /iy/ /i/ /ey/ /e/ // // /a/ /oh/ /ow/ /u/ /uw/ Assonant word deed did date dead Dad dud dot dog dote took do
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Applied linguists typically organize this information in the form of a vowel quadrilateral,23 a trapezoidal table that functions as their equivalent of the periodic table of elements. Table 2 lists both the range of possible positions the tongue and lips can assume and the vowels associated with these positions. The first column to the left of the example shows the tongues relative height in the mouth. In order for you to say the word sequence deed, date, and Dad so that a native English speaker will understand you, you need to drop your tongue from the high position of the vowel /iy/ through the middle position of /ey/ to the low position of //. The second column from the left shows the tongues position relative to the front and back of the mouth. In order to say the word sequence deed, dud, do, you need to move your tongue back away from the teeth, where the vowel /iy/ results, through the neutral position of / / to the backward position of /uw/. Table 2 also shows the roles of spreading the lips apart, as one does when smiling, and of rounding the lips, as one does when pouting. The Trager-Smith phonemes indicate such lip spreading and rounding with the phonemes /y/ and /w/, respectivelya convention that shows this transcription systems narrow or prescriptive aspect. I have held off considering diphthongs in the above discussion because they introduce instability into the formation of vowels. Table 3 shows how the movements that a speaker makes while saying the word dew /dyuw/, for instance, entail keeping the tongue in a high position while shifting it from front to back. Note, as well, in the use of the symbols /y/ and /w/ the role of the lips in creating the transition from one pure vowel to another. The changes in the tongue and lip position that produce the diphthongs shown in Table 3 also produce changes in pure vowels formants. By keeping my tongue high while I say the word dew, for example, I keep the vocal passageway restricted in a
23
Daniel Jones, An Outline of English Phonetics (Cambridge, UK: Heffer, 1956). Not all linguists agree on the value and significance of Joness W-shaped chart. See, for example, John Esling, There Are No Back Vowels: The Laryngeal Articulator Model, The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La revue canadienne de linguistique 50 (MarchDecember 2005): 1344. But in applied linguistics, the vowel quadrilateral still serves a practical function: instructing non-native speakers in English language pronunciation.
Table 3 Unstable English-language vowels.

Tongues Articulation Low/Center to High/Front Low/Front to High/Back Mid/Back to High/Front High/Front to High/Back Lips Articulation Neutral to Round Neutral to Round Neutral to Spread Spread to Round /ay/ /w/ /oy/ /yuw/ Phoneme (/a/iy) (//uw) (/oh/iy/) (/iy/uw/) Assonant die doubt toy dew
way that maintains a relatively high first formant frequency in both the initial /y/ (or /iy/) and the final /uw/. While doing so, I also produce a drop in the frequency of the second formant by shifting the tongue from front to back, which produces the necessary change in sound between the initial and final simple vowels. It is these acoustical changes that enable a native listener to hear and make sense of the sound variations that I produce with the movements of my articulators when I pronounce the word you. The descriptive aspect of the Trager-Smith symbols enables us to examine more closely the ways that Armstrongs formants correlate his vocal production with the listeners perception of timbre. The linguist Roman Jakobson and his co-investigators devised a powerful tool for the timbral analysis of speech when they developed their distinctive feature theory of phonetics.24 Building on the foundation laid by Jakobson, et al., the composer/ theorist Wayne Slawson selects as acoustical dimensions of vowels the distinctive features of openness, acuteness, laxness, and smallness.25 Because these dimensions influence listeners perceptions of vocal timbre, and therefore their understanding of the words being sung, a singers vocal technique must clearly give him or her control over them. For the present discussion, I will focus on the first three dimensions. In hearing a speaker move from the upper to the lower group of vowels shown in Table 4, a native listener will experience a decrease in the sounds openness due to a drop in the first formant frequency.26 In other words, the listeners ability to discriminate among the vowels in dog, dote, and do depends on his or her sensation of changes in the first formant frequency. Of the 34 vocables Armstrong sings in chorus III of Skid Dat De Dat, nearly half contain the most open vowels available to him, i.e., the vowels shown at the top of Table 4. The vowel // serves as the nucleus for nearly a quarter of the solos vocables. As with the bell of a trumpet, which a horn player can either mute or leave open, Armstrongs vowel choices increase or decrease the degree to which his vocal instrument releases or holds back his tones openness. Incidentally, speaking of mutes, Joseph Tricky Sam Nantons
24 Roman Jakobson, C.G.M. Fant and M. Halle, Preliminaries of Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and Their Correlates (Boston, MA: The MIT Press, 1967). 25 See Slawson, Sound Color. 26 Slawsons use of the term Openness in place of Jakobsens term Compactness is consistent with the IPA description of vowels. See also Caroline Traube and Philippe Depalle, Phonetic Gestures Underlying Guitar Timbre Description, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, ed. Scott Lipscomb, et al. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 2004), 658661. Published on CD-ROM, the online version of this paper is available at the conference website: http://icmpc8.umn.edu/proceedings/ICMPC8/PDF/AUTHOR/MP040123.PDF (accessed July 29, 2007).
Jazz Perspectives Table 4 Acoustical features of stable English-language vowels: openness.

Most open: // /a/ /oh/ /ey/ /e/ / / /ow/ /iy/ /i/ /u/ /uw/ (Dad) (dot) (dog) (date) (dead) (dud) (dote) (deed) (did) (took) (do)
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Moderately open:
Least open (i.e. closed):
growl and plunger technique takes advantage of this acoustical feature of the covered and uncovered bell of a trombone to evoke the sound of the human voice with the ya-ya or wa-wa effects in his solo on Duke Ellingtons famous 1940 recording of Koko. Hearing the second formant frequency results in the sensation of a vowels acuteness or, roughly speaking, its relative brightness.27 In Table 5, I have arranged several vowels in groupings that move from greater to lesser acuteness. A vowels acuteness influences listeners ability to differentiate between the words Dad and dot or between dud and dog. Armstrong builds his scat chorus on Skid Dat De Dat primarily out of the vowels that lack either extreme brightness or extreme darkness. This overall reduction in the range of sonic possibilities allows the solos few instances of extremely acute vowels, such as /uw/ and /iy/, to stand out, in stark contrast to the others, thereby gaining in expressive force. The vowels on the extreme ends of the acuteness scale have in common a low first formant frequency, thus giving them less openness than those toward the middle of the scale. In other words, they can negatively influence the singers vocal projection. Armstrong uses the most and least acute vowels sparingly and to good effect.
27
Traube and Depalle, Phonetic Gestures. Noting that guitarists vary plucking position in order to produce different timbres (getting a nasal, metallic sound closer to the bridge, for example, or a round, mellow sound closer to the middle of the string), the authors investigated the fact that guitar tones and a particular set of vowels display similar formant regions. Thus, despite the obvious structural differences between the acoustical systems of the guitar and of the vocal apparatus, the researchers looked into the possibility of applying distinctive features of speech sounds to guitar sounds. In an experiment conducted to confirm whether perceptual analogies between guitar sounds and vocal sounds found at the spectral level would lead research subjects to associate a consonant to the attack and a vowel to the sustain of guitar tones, the researchers learned that guitarists borrow terms from phonetics to describe the perceptual dimensions of guitar timbres. When the subjects described a guitar sound as round, for example, the sound resembles a vowel produced with a round-shaped mouth, such as the vowel /ow/. Thus, a set of verbal timbre descriptors commonly used by guitarists also refer to phonetic gestures (open, oval, round, thin, closed, nasal, hollow, etc.). This research was also presented as Caroline Traube and Philippe Depalle, Timbral Analogies Between Vowels and Plucked String Tones, Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2004) (Montreal, Quebec, May 2004).
Table 5 Acoustical features of stable English-language vowels: acuteness.

Most acute: /iy/ /i/ /ey/ /e/ // / / /a/ /oh/ /ow/ /u/ /uw/ (deed) (did) (date) (dead) (Dad) (dud) (dot) (dog) (dote) (took) (do)
Moderately acute: Least acute:
A vowels laxness corresponds to its perceived shortness (see Table 6). This acoustical feature relates to the production of long and short vowels, which involve a greater or lesser degree of muscular tension, respectively, not only in the tongue position but also in the rounding or spreading of a vocalists lips. In Skid Dat De Dat, the general association between long vowels and long rhythmic values seems hardly surprising. Yet less experienced singers routinely miss opportunities to give long rhythmic values greater resonance through this association. Of more significance, vocables that contain short vowels tend to come right before or right after those that contain long vowels, thereby producing the solos atypical instances of connected phrasing. For example, early in the scat solo (at 1:28), Armstrong sings the long-short vocable pair /diydu/ with a long-short rhythm and a descending melodic contour. The musical setting of the vocable text here recalls the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables characteristic of English multisyllable words. Reinforcing this effect, Armstrong ghosts the lower pitch of /diydu/, thus echoing the reduced vowels of unaccented syllables (such as the -ful in the word peaceful.) This approach to phrasing, coupled with the descending melodic contour of /diydu/, suggests auditory links to the intonations and accentuations of the spoken word and evokes English language speech rhythms.28 In these ways, Armstrong translates an everyday activity, which native speakers of that language perform routinely and without conscious awareness, into a musical gesture. As Example 2 shows, the scat solo on Skid Dat De Dat provides us with a rich quarry of data, on the surface, phoneticbut, by inference, phonemicabout the ways Armstrong uses his vocal technique to translate the ordinary into the extraordinary. The following analysis allows us to dig into this technique to learn how this solo speaks to us.
28
Clark Terrys famous mumbling style of scat singing goes even further in the direction of implying speech rhythms and accentuation. Other scat singers have exploited the association between speech and scat as well, including Al Jarreau (on Look to the Rainbow, Warner Bros., B66059W, 1977, LP) and Bobby McFerrin (on The Voice, Elektra/Asylum Records, CD UPC 075596036627, Elektra LP 603661-E, 1984, compact disc).
Jazz Perspectives Table 6 Acoustical features of stable English-language vowels: laxness.

Least relaxed (i.e., most tense): /iy/ /ey/ // /oh/ /ow/ /uw/ /i/ /e/ /a/ /u/ // (deed) (date) (Dad) (dog) (dote) (do) (did) (dead) (dot) (took) (dud)
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Moderately relaxed:
Most relaxed (most tense):
Armstrongs Vocal Performance The lyrics of Louis Armstrongs scat solo on Skid Dat De Dat shown in Example 2 consist of a sequence of vocable chains. Each vocable, in turn, includes an initial consonant and a vowel. A horizontal line after a vowel shows that Armstrong sustained that vowel. A blank space after a vowel indicates the silence that results from a cessation of tone production. A colon /:/ after the final vowel and in front of the blank space shows that Armstrong ended the sound abruptly with a glottal stop (the suddenly closing of the muscles of the larynx, which is situated just above the vocal cords). Below, I will give this technique further consideration. Each vocables alignment with the numbers at the top of Example 2 indicates its timing within the measure. The barlines in front of the syllables align with the number 1 at the top of the page. In the absence of rhythm section support during the breaks, the listener imputes a metric impulse from a variety of factors. These factors include the rhythmic organization of each preceding passage, the precise duration and accentuation of the sounds that make up the solo, and the change in texture that results when the band reenters after each break. The above discussion shows that the breaks and ensemble sections work together to sustain the arrangements narrative flow of ideas. From here on, however, I will consider the vocal solo in isolation from the rest of the performance.29 Armstrong makes the most of his sonic resources. Yet even as he shows off his playful ingenuity in the selection and sequencing of sounds in this solo, he also creates a distinctive timbral vocabulary that sets the solo apart from other scat singers work, as well as from other scat solos he recorded. Thus, while the process of timbral variation generates microscopic surprises that keep ones ear engaged in Armstrongs story, timbral reiteration makes the solo memorable. For example, his choice to initiate almost every vocable with the voiced plosive /d/ gives the solo
29
Due to lack of space, the discussion will not take into account historical or social factors that led to and from Armstrongs recording with this particular group of musicians, on that particular day, at that particular site.
consistency. This consonant predominates in many of his scat solos, such as his 1927 solo on Hotter Than That. There and elsewhere, however, Armstrong uses other initial consonants, too (for instance, the voiced plosive /b/). The jazz scholar Milton Stewart argues that, in starting vocables with voiced plosives, scat singers are copying brass players oft-used da tonguing.30 But this undeniable correlation between vocal and instrumental technique does not prove a causal connection. We cannot know with certainty in which direction the influence moved. But in this case it seems more likely that, by invoking the dental plosive /d/ in their attack, brass players are taking their cue from the consonants of singers (and speakers). In general, because timbre offers musicians the most visceral means of standing out from the crowd, one might expect the influence to flow most often from singers, with their vast timbral palette, to instrumentalists. However, while many methods of articulation transfer readily from voice to instrument or vice versa, not all do. For example, scat singers rarely (if ever) initiate vocables with the unvoiced plosive /t/, which brass players use to produce accents. Releasing such an explosive blast of air into a microphone would produce distortion. Conversely, trumpeters cannot attack their tone with the voiced plosive /b/ that scat vocalists commonly use as an initial consonant. In pressing their lips up against the mouthpiece to form their embouchure, brass players cannot mimic a bilabial articulation. As jazz vocal technique evolved over time, scat singers expanded their timbral vocabulary with other initial consonants (such as the sh often associated with Sarah Vaughan). Nevertheless, to this day, scat singers continue to initiate vocables most often with /b/ and /d/, probably because they can form these consonants (among the first we produce as infants) with the greatest ease, thereby allowing for speed of execution. Armstrongs vocal and instrumental solos on Skid Dat De Dat illustrate several other ways in which the cross-talk between singers and instrumentalists informs musicians approaches to timbre. The vowel //, for example, is characterized by openness, acuteness, and length. This sound notably evokes the penetrating tone of the trumpet in its upper register. The recurrence of the vowel // throughout the solo also serves a structural function by giving Armstrongs sonic flights of fancy a timbral point of reference. In contrast, Armstrong saves other sounds for special moments, such as the bright /iy/ sound, which occurs only twice in the entire solo. Armstrongs thriftiness enables him to keep listeners engaged in the story of the solo by generating memorable small-dimension surprises along the way. By linking later moments to earlier ones through timbral means, Armstrong helps listeners hear the solo as more than the unrelated phrases Edward Brooks maps out. For example, by situating the above-mentioned recurrence of /iy/ vowels in parallel places in the form, Armstrong bridges over the contrasting music that comes between the opening and closing phrases, thereby rounding out the solo. The solos concentrated palette of tone colors heightens the impact of Armstrongs sonic inventiveness. Table 7 shows that, from only two-thirds of the fifteen vowel
30
Ibid.
Table 7 Frequency and relative length of vowels in Skid Dat De Dat, Chorus III.
Vowel iy i ey e a oh ow u uw Diphthongs ay w owi (oy) yuw Other: *dl_____ Total Total 2 1 8 4 2 4 3 5 2 1 2 34 Distribution 1(A) 1(A0) 1(A9) 4(A) 2(A9) 2(A0) 2(A9) 2(A0) 2(A0) 2(A) 2(A0) 1(A) 2(A9) 2(A) 3(A9) Relative duration diy_____ diy_____: di___ (di__|dow_____.) d_: d___|: d___: |d___ d___:|d___: d *_____|_____. da_____|___: da_____: da_: da_: d : d __ *oh_____: doh_____: doh_: doh_|_: |dow_____. dow_:_|dow_____. du: du_: du_ du____: du_: Comment Consistently sung with long durations Latter occurrence phrased short-long Never occurs Never occurs Occurs on downbeats 26 In *d_dl______|_____. Last vowel sound of solo break Smeared in 1st occurrence; Phrased 26 in short durations No pattern in phrasing, sung with varying durations. In *d___dl_oh_____: 26 phrase endings on downbeats Consistently sung with short durations Never occurs Never occurs Consistently sung with long durations doit Never occurs Transitional consonant /l/ (lateral approximant)
1(A) 1(A9) (A0)
dw_____ dw_______: dowi:
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(A, A0)
dl_____ dl_____
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sounds available in the English language, Armstrong distills a unique timbral language for this solo. Vowels that form English words when preceded by /d/ (such as day, debt, do, die, and dew) do not occur at all. Table 7 shows the distribution of vowels in the solo. The example reveals one reason why the vowel /iy/ stands out in this context. Found at the top of the timbral scale, this vowel shines several degrees brighter than the next brightest long vowel in the solo, the predominant //. Similarly, Armstrong saves the darkest long vowel in the solo, /ow/, for only two key moments (see Example 2). As the final vowel of the breaks in IIIA (1:31) and in IIIA9 (1:43), /ow/ comes at the end of an overall pitch descent. By reusing this vowel in the second breakand, indeed, by singing it twice thereArmstrong echoes and expands upon the quasi-cadential function /ow/ served in the preceding phrase. At the parallel moment, in IIIA0 (2:02), when one has come to expect it, however, Armstrong sings the signature // sound. Again, timbre helps to round out the solo. Yet the // vowel also sounds fresh here, partly because Armstrong has not used it since before the bridge and partly because we have come to associate it with the upper register in which he started. Earlier in this last break (1:59), Armstrong substitutes the darker /oh/ in place of the lighter //, a development that is followed by the only other recurrence of the vowel /iy/. This variation allows /iy/ to stand out all the more from the preceding vowel, thus reminding us that we had heard it at the parallel moment in the first break (1:28). These timbral inflections help to bring this mournful solo around full circle (2:02), consequently ending on a lighter note while also signaling, through the locally contrastive function // now serves, that more lies ahead. Pitch does play a role in the listening experience, of course, and Armstrongs timbral variations function in relation to his pitch choices. The transcription of the first vocal break in Example 4 shows how the scat lyrics depicted in Example 2 align with the pitches Armstrong sang during IIIA. Placing the phonemes in relation to the melody reveals how timbre and dynamics sculpt the voices rising and falling into a vibrant musical expression. In the absence of such timbral variation, a musicians movement from one pitch to the next would sound bland and unmusical. Detailed phrasing, articulation, and accentuation markings do not figure conspicuously in many jazz transcriptions. Older players who learned the music by ear (and who commonly discourage a heavy reliance on the notes) do not typically need such expressive notations. They have already absorbed the style languages correct pronunciation. Many transcribers know that the notation fails to capture the rich variety of phrasing, articulation, and accentuation available to the jazz
Example 4 Skid Dat De Dat, IIIA, first vocal break, transcription.
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performer. So they leave their transcriptions relatively unmarked, assuming that the reader will listen to the recording while studying a transcription. Students who use the notes mainly to remind themselves which key to press in order to produce the correct pitch may turn to the recording to absorb features that the notes cannot convey. Not knowing what to listen for, however, some may miss these important clues to expressive jazz performance practice. The transcription in Example 4 does include some expression markings. But these notations can only hint at the punchy, percussive articulation that enlivens Armstrongs vocal line with his characteristic rhythmic energy. In Early Jazz, Gunther Schuller points out that Armstrongs articulation contributes markedly to his swing by delineating each sounds onset and release, i.e., its envelope.31 He extends this idea in his 1989 book, The Swing Era, where he includes waveform analyses of various instrumentalists work. His comments about timbre bear repeating. He suggests that envelope tracings do not directly show the spectral characteristics of a sound, which largely determine its timbre. Nevertheless, the envelope does show some information relevant to timbre.32 The waveform of Armstrongs singing shown in Figure 1 (produced using the audio production freeware Audacity) illustrates Schullers point. This illustration exposes in graphic detail the microscopic silences that etch Armstrongs sounds in stark relief. In representing the sound envelope, the waveform conveys information about the attack, sustain, and decay of Armstrongs vocal tone. The waveforms alignment with the vertical lines above it shows the rhythmic placement of each sound in relation to the common time meter. Every fourth line corresponds to the barline in standard music notation. Beneath each shape, a phonemic transcription of Armstrongs scat vocables shows how the timbre of each sound relates to the waveform above it. As with Example 2, this means of representing sound reveals features of Armstrongs performance that standard notation leaves out. Gunther Schuller has written impressionistically about Armstrongs phrasing and articulation in reference to the first four notes that the trumpeter plays on his classic 1928 version of West End Blues:
The way Louis attacks each note, the quality and exact duration of each pitch, the manner in which he releases the note, and the subsequent split-second silence before the next notein other words, the entire acoustical patternpresent in capsule form all the essential characteristics of jazz inflection.33
Audio signals such as the one depicted in Figure 1 make it possible to study systematically these features of Armstrongs craft. By displaying the envelope of each sound Armstrong produced with his voice, Figure 1 also shows that Schullers observations hold true not only for Armstrongs instrumental work, but for his singing as well. Specifically, Figure 1 reveals the rhythmic impact of Armstrongs
31 32
Schuller, Early Jazz, 91. Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 19301945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 859. 33 Schuller, Early Jazz, 116.
Figure 1 Skid Dat De Dat, IIIA, first vocal break, waveform.
glottal stops, his preferred method of interrupting the flow of air. Singers produce glottal stops at the back of the throat. Thus, unlike final plosive consonantsthe labial /p/ or alveolar /t/, for exampleglottal stops do not engage the lips or tongue in the stoppage of air. Glottal stops therefore facilitate transitions in the vocal apparatus from one articulatory position to another by keeping the tongue and teeth out of the way and by allowing the lips to remain apart. Their usage occurs often in the rapid-fire everyday pronunciation of words. For example, American English speakers often use glottal stops as the allophonic equivalent of plosives when a consonant initiates the following syllable. In fact, when Americans enunciate the final /t/s in their phrasesI canT give you anything buT love, baby,they sound decidedly Bri-Tish indeed! Conversely, in transcribing scat vocals, writers generally notate glottal stops with final consonants (for example, the /t/s in the word Dat featured in the title of Skid Dat De Dat). Armstrongs glottal stops in this solo give his singing the percussive articulation so essential to his swing. The less frequent passages in which Armstrong links one sound to the next therefore stand out as unusual in this context. As pointed out earlier, at times they may also echo the speech rhythms and accentuation of multisyllabic English words. The waveform also reveals rhythmic nuances that standard notation fails to show. The repeated pitches that launch the scat solo (sung on /d/, /d/, /diy/) gain in agogic momentum because each pitch grows successively longer until the third G4. Armstrong does not sing each successive pitch any louder than the one before it. But as these detached pitches take on more and more agogic weight, they produce the effect of a crescendo that culminates in the third pitchs bright /iy/ vowel. As mentioned above, Armstrong phrases the last of these repeated G-naturals into the E-natural a third below by means of the vocable chain /diy/du/. Figure 1 dramatizes the phrasing by illustrating the effect that shading the latter pitch with the short /u/ vowel and ghosting it produces on the amplitude of the audio signal. Despite its
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de-accentuation, the E4 fills an important function. In the flow of events, it culminates the preceding three-fold pitch repetition in a release of melodic movement, while also providing a jumping-off place to the next pitch, the highest of the break. Yet, while the passage would not swing without this microscopic sound, it would also not swing if the sound received any more emphasis than it does. Looking back at Example 4, we can see that standard notation lacks the subtlety to show how this fleeting moment functions in the flow of events. Figure 1 shows that the next two pitches, sung on /d/ and /du/, land squarely on the beat. Armstrong reveals here how strongly his internal metric impulse governs the breaks rhythmic organization. In the absence of a rhythm section to mark the beat and the start of each measure, his phrasing and accentuation assert the common-time meter so the listener does not get lost in time. The expectant silences that come after each of these pitches help to generate anacrusic suspense that resolves in the downbeat of the next measure (where Armstrong also returns to the opening pitch). These descending pitches propel the melodic line to the ensuing legato passage, where he phrases together the scat syllables /d/, /dl/, and /oh/ to produce a three-syllable word /ddloh/. This vocable chain rhymes with the phrases had a law or battle awe if one says it quickly and smoothly with American English pronunciation. As in the earlier legato passage, he mutes the lowest pitch, this time by blocking the airflow with the consonant /l/. The way he phrases this melodic contour, and, in particular the way he ghosts the C-natural, recalls speech intonation. He then releases the air stream into the relatively dark vowel /oh/ while smearing the pitch upwards. Having hovered around G4 during the start of the break, the increased rhythmic and melodic activity here generates excitement, while the smears novelty sears the passage into the listeners memory. In Example 4, we see that this connected passage leads to a quarter-note C-natural, the implied chord root, which falls on the third beat of the measure. Armstrong gave structural importance to the third beat of the preceding measure, at the climactic Bflat. The C-naturals timing reinforces an underlying half-note pulsation, which informs all of the vocal breaks in Skid Dat De Dat. But by shortening this pitch slightly and by separating it from the ensuing soundsin effect using it as a steppingstone on his way to the ensuing downbeatArmstrong sustains the musical flow by keeping the tonic from producing closure. Phrasing together the last pitches of the break with the two-syllable vocable chain /daewdow/ (which rhymes with the phrase how so), Armstrong ends an octave lower than he began. He had used these same pitch classes at the breaks climax. However, by squeezing the lower pitches into a shorter time span, blurring them with a descending smear, and linking them together with legato phrasing, he generates more contrast between the two passages than similarity. Traveling from the vowels // and /iy/ at the start of the break to the vowels /oh/ and /ow/ at the end, Armstrong descends more and more into a timbral shadow. Rarely do rules apply across the board, least of all in jazz. So it may not be useful to generalize about correspondences between timbre and pitch. Indeed, throughout the solo, Armstrong eschews a rigid correspondence between tessitura and timbral
coloration.34 In this first break, after singing two repeated G4s on the vowel //, for example, Armstrong sings a brighter, narrower vowel /iy/ on the third G4. Here he varies the timbre without changing pitch. He then reprises the less bright but more open vowel // when he rises to the ensuing B-flat. However, a general relationship between vocal range and tone color emerges in the breaks that come before the bridge. From the start of each break in IIIA and IIIA9, Armstrong grabs the listeners attention with an engaging brashness that echoes the brazenness of his horn sound, highlighting his high-pitched vocal entrances. Having set himself apart from the group, he then proceeds to make a transition in timbre that eases his vocal line into the instrumental fold, allowing his voice to blend with the ensemble. After the bridge, however, Armstrong diverges from this pattern, shading the overall descent with relatively brighter vowels and ending with a parting reminder of the vowel // that has predominated. The difference stands out all the more because of the pattern he set up in the earlier breaks. During this performance, a relationship also emerges between tessitura and loudness that lends Armstrongs melodic contours a quality of emotional release. In each of the breaks, the highest pitches have the loudest volume. As the melodic line descends, so, too, does the overall dynamic level. This action may not reflect a conscious choice. In fact, from the standpoint of vocal technique, the melodic contour of each phrase simply grows naturally from his breath control. At the outset of each break, Armstrong uses the most powerful region of his vocal range to assert his voice boldly. Having released the greatest volume of air, the drop in each phrases general dynamic level reflects the decreased air pressure that remains in his lungs (even though he takes short breaths). Timbral modulation from brighter to darker vowels in each of the first two breaks (mentioned above) reinforces the expressive aspect of the diminuendo and the corresponding pitch descent. Armstrong accomplishes this modulation by increasingly muting the upper partials and by filtering the source vibrations to shade the vowels as his air pressure decreases. By letting his ideas flow organically from his vocal instruments natural strengths and limitations, Armstrong creates a three-fold correspondence of musical elements, or as the music theorist Jan LaRue might call it, concinnity. 35 In showing the integral role these elements play in the formation of musical ideas, Armstrong forces me to wonder what we, as theorists, stand to gain from focusing so much on pitch. He combines the basic elements of musicpitch, dynamics, rhythm, and timbrewith the ease that an alchemist unites earth, air, fire,
34
In an interview with Leslie Gourse, which appears in Louis Children: American Jazz Singers (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1984), 142147, Clark Terry cites Louis Armstrong as his primary inspiration. Describing his own approach to scatting, Terry claims that he links vocal register and vocal timbre more consistently, associating the bright vowel /iy/ with his high register, for example, and the dark vowel /uw/ with his low register. This entire section of Chapter 12 in Gourses book contains insights into Terrys approach to teaching jazz performance, both as an instrumentalist and as a singer. 35 LaRue, Guidelines for Style Analysis, 142143.
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and water, thereby leading listeners to organize their experience into pure musical gold. Even a pitch analysis of the scat solo on Skid Dat De Dat benefits from reaching beyond standard European models to factor in melodic norms rooted in the blues tradition and other African American musical practices that inform Armstrongs work. To be sure, in all of Armstrongs breaks in this recording, C-natural functions as the root of the chord, E-natural as the third, and G-natural as the fifth. However, the pitch B-flat does not function in the conventional sense as the seventh of the V7/ IV. Here, an intentionally variable, flatted-seventh scale degree produces an expressive coloration of the major scale. Consequently, it functions as an unstable subtonic scale degree that cancels the leading tone (B-natural) and softens the pull to the tonic. In blues tonality, no implicit tonal logic compels the subtonic to resolve to the third of the F-Major chord, as it would in traditional voice leading. All four choruses of this recording do make use of this feature of traditional tonality at the end of each A9 section, just before the IV chord at the start of the bridge, when Armstrong plays the seventh of the prevailing V7/IV harmony. Armstrong gives definition to indefinite pitches by situating smears between clearly established scale degrees. Thus as the scales lowered seventh degree slides down to the sixth, the raised second degree slides up to the third. The smears themselves, however, do not fit into the tempered tuning system, let alone in the system of functional harmony. The gently directed movement toward the tonic harmony in Skid Dat De Dat, as evidenced in the absence of a G7 chord throughout, gives Armstrong a tonally flexible pitch set that parallels the rhythmic fluidity with which he handles time (another source of concinnity). The second vocal break, shown in Example 5, shares enough features with the first to function as a variation of it, thus reaching backward across the intervening ensemble passage to generate continuity. Yet significant contrasts propel this break along in the solos narrative. Armstrongs choice to start out higher than before gives the second break greater intensity. And the high B-flat, sounded twice now, calls with greater urgency. The plot thickens when Armstrong steps outside of metric time and equaltempered tuning and sings an extended smear that pours across the barline into the next measure. In the solos large dimension growth, this smear generates continuity by expanding upon the memorable smear that was heard in the first break. But by spreading the smear across the longest rhythmic value we have heard thus far, and by using a fresh vocal timbre (the open /a/ sound), Armstrong also creates smalldimension movement.
Example 5 Skid Dat De Dat, IIIA9, second vocal break, transcription.
Figure 2 Skid Dat De Dat, IIIA9, second vocal break, waveform.
The waveform of the second vocal break, shown in Figure 2, reveals another reason why this smear stands out so strongly from the music that immediately precedes it. In all other preceding passages in this break, Armstrong has separated pitches with disconnected phrasing. Here, however, several pitches (albeit indefinite ones) blur together by virtue of the slurred phrasing. The angular roughness of the waveform at the ensuing vocable, /dw/, shows how vibrato introduces a greater level of complexity in the sound. At the end of the break, Armstrong introduces a new timbre, the short vowel /i/ in the vocable chain /di/dow/, and phrases it as an anacrusic upbeat into /dow/, the final vocable. The third vocal break, shown in Example 6, provides a culmination for the preceding two by contrasting strongly with them, not unlike the third phrase in a standard tri-partite blues form. This passage has a wider ambitus than the earlier breaksdropping down to D3, a 12th lower than the breaks climactic A4s. It also does not climb as far up as the subtonic. At the start of the break, Armstrong barely contains the rhythmic energy of his syncopations as he cuts into the beat with short, detached rhythmic values. The waveform in Figure 3 shows the choppiness of these syncopations. In Example 6, we can see another reason why this break sounds so different from previous ones. Armstrong divides this solo passage into two sub-phrases that are each marked by an internal repetition, with the latter sub-phrase occupying the same metric position as the former and echoing it an octave lower. Armstrong uses vocal
Example 6 Skid Dat De Dat, IIIA0, third vocal break, transcription.
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Figure 3 Skid Dat De Dat, IIIA0, third vocal break, waveform.
timbre to reinforce this echo by repeating the phonemes in the restatement. There is one key difference, however. Instead of the tense, bright vowel /iy/ that he had sung in the first sub-phrase, he sings a relaxed, yet dull / /. By not repeating the first subphrases vocables here verbatim, Armstrong protects the role /iy/ had served in drawing the structural arc between the first and last breaks (as mentioned earlier). This timbral variation, which occurs on the longest sound in the third break, functions in the small dimension as well by sustaining the solos movement through the sub-phrasal repetition discussed above. Again stressing the third beat of the measure, as he had in the first break, Armstrong also generates small-scale movement with the smeared doit on the third beat of the first complete measure of the break. This latter effect stands out for occurring once in the entire solo. Could this vocable chain be the source for the name of the eponymous instrumental technique? The breaks last vocable chain, /ddl/, begins in the same metric position as the doit. Yet it contrasts with much of what has come before it because of its legato phrasing. Armstrong ties the sustained G3 across the bar line, a final syncopation that allows the band to mark the downbeat while he slides across his solos finish line. Parallels between Instrumental and Vocal Timbre If we rewind to the start of the performance, we can hear Armstrongs first instrumental break (shown in Example 7) in relation to the vocal breaks. Armstrong plays this break in a slightly slower tempo than the rest of the performance.
Example 7 Skid Dat De Dat, IA, first instrumental break, transcription.
Moreover, in the second complete measure, Armstrong obliterates any sense of groove by hanging back on the smear. The ad lib feeling of this beginning lends it an introductory character that may trick listeners into missing its function in the form of the first chorus. When the band comes in at m. 3, Armstrong has clearly cued them with an upbeat, which in turn propels his comrades into the faster tempo of 120 beats per minute (this quarter-note tempo prevails throughout the performance). Readers may notice a feature of this break that has eluded many listeners. The passage shown in Example 7 is almost identical to the one shown in Example 5, which showed the second scat vocal break at the start of IIIA9. How different these breaks sound in their respective positions in the form! And yet, despite their extreme difference in structural function (and in relative tessitura: the pitches sit in the upper part of Armstrongs vocal register but in the lower half of the trumpet range), the fact remains that in his scat solo Armstrong reproduces almost pitch-for-pitch and rhythm-for-rhythm the passage he played on the trumpet at the start of the performance. The similarity of these melodic passages raises some question about the degree to which Armstrong was improvising. But it does much more than that. Of all the evidence I have offered thus far, these examples most clearly dramatize my central point. From their comparison we can adduce that Louis Armstrong acquired much more than vibrato from his and others vocal techniques. In his trumpet playing, which is just as natural and as inspired as his singing, a listener can hear all the nuances, inflections, and natural ease of his vocal expression. To suggest that Armstrongs trumpet playing is merely the instrumental counterpart of his singing, and thereby flip around Schullers comparison completely, would seem absurd. Wasnt it through the instrumental medium, primarily, that Armstrong asserted the aesthetic worth of his musical ideas? I would not go so far as to turn Schullers subtle condescension of Armstrongs singing on its head. But I challenge the assumption behind Schullers methodology. Aesthetically, Armstrongs singing and his trumpet playing stand on equal footing. If any question remains regarding the ways that a researchers biases can influence his or her methodology, turn to Schullers analysis of Skid Dat De Dat in Early Jazz.36 In this discussion, Schuller make two points about Armstrong. First, he argues that the trumpet player demonstrates his vast technical superiority over the other front line players in the Hot Five. Second, in the tonal ambivalence of Armstrongs opening break, which seems to start in a different key from the tune, Schuller suggests that the innovator anticipates Dizzy Gillespies out-of-key break on I Cant Get Started. In the entire passage, Schuller never once mentions Armstrongs vocal performance. I will address elsewhere the flaws of the first point, which echoes Andre Hodiers criticism of Johnny Dodds and Kid Ory.37 Schullers second point only makes sense if one believes that the establishment of tonal stability serves an important aesthetic function in this performance. But the
36 37
Schuller, Early Jazz, 10506. Andre Hodier, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 4962.
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consistency of the musical language that links Armstrongs vocal and instrumental work in Skid Dat De Dat suggests that the breaks originate in blues licks, not in the rules of common-practice Western tonality. Indeed, when heard in a blue context, this passage implies no ambivalence at all. Working within the precise constraints of the blues, Armstrong cannot smear the stable root of an E-flat major chord, only the volatile third of a C major chord. If Schuller had paid attention to the scat vocals, he might have erroneously considered the opening licks reappearance at IIIA9 in the second vocal break to be a precursor of thematic improvisation (but at least he would have interpreted the opening trumpet break correctly). In his quest to legitimize Armstrongs greatness in terms of the musical progress Armstrong spurred as an instrumentalist, Schuller missed other critical aspects of Armstrongs music such as his singingthat offer not only aesthetic value but also investigative substance. With regard to vocalists contributions to the jazz idiom, the discipline of jazz studies has not traveled far beyond the waters Gunther Schuller charted in his two influential books. Worse, by using analytic methods that untie the jazz improvisers craft from its expressive moorings in timbre, phrasing, articulation, and accentuation, jazz scholarship itself drifts further and further away from the multidimensional sound image that impelled the creation of the jazz language. Armstrongs contributions as a singer, on Skid Dat De Dat and elsewhere, challenge us to enrich our thinking about his music by examining data gathered from unlikely sources, such as scat vocables and audio waveforms. A comparison of the first instrumental and second vocal breaks waveforms, Figures 4, below, and 2, above, respectively, reveals the audible consistency of phrasing, articulation, and accentuation that governs both Armstrongs trumpet playing and his singing. The strong similarity of these two passages suggests that a unitary concept was, indeed, impelling both his singing and his playing. Louis Armstrong enlarged the jazz vocabulary by dissolving many of the idiomatic features and transcending many of the technical limitations that have traditionally set the instrumental and vocal modalities apart from each other. By so doing, he extended the expressive power of each modality. Vocalistic techniques that he
Figure 4 Skid Dat De Dat, IA, first instrumental break, waveform.
popularized such as doits, smearing, bending, scooping, shaking, and growling continue to make a substantial contribution to the jazz instrumentalists toolkit. The sheer technical facility of his trumpet playing makes a powerful impression on the listener. But as impressive as it is, this feature does not serve the purpose of technical display alone. In crisscrossing the imaginary boundary between instrumental and vocal expression that James D. Hart and others have tried to impose on music, Armstrong embodies an attribute of West African languages and African American expressive culture: the musicality of speech and the speech-icality of music. In bringing the same degree of technical proficiency to his singing as he does to his instrumental work, Armstrong dares the Cannonball Adderleys and the Gerry Mulligans to recognize a jazz singer as such. Louis Armstrong was both guided by and affirming an aesthetic criterion that I believe functions as a defining criterion of jazz performance from Dixieland to free jazz: idiomatic crossover. If, as Scott DeVeaux has suggested, the notion of a unified jazz tradition is merely a cultural construction,38 then this aesthetic criterion forms an I-beam running through that edifice, lending it stability amid the winds of stylistic change. For this reason, we stand to deepen our understanding of jazz by affirming the aesthetic interdependence between instrumental and vocal improvisation. Armstrong was not the only horn player to emulate vocal expression. But as the most technically advanced example of his generation, his model provided the basis for the phrasing, articulation, and accentuation that would come to characterize the jazz idiom during the Swing era.39 Among jazz scholars and musicians, Armstrongs seminal role in the development of early jazz styles remains beyond doubt. We all have much to learn, then, from listening closely to Armstrongs performances, instrumental and vocal alike. Acknowledgements Many thanks to the CUNY Research Foundation, whose generous support made this study possible, as well as to the Greater New York Chapter of the American Musicological Society, the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers-Newark, and the ation Musicale (OICM) and the Faculty of Music Observatoire International de la Cre al, all of which provided forums for presentations of this at University of Montre research. I also thank the readers who helped in the process of revision, including Elizabeth Gordon, Steve Reiter, and Jennifer Griffith. Finally, many thanks to Patrick Williams for preparing the illustrations for publication.
38
Scott DeVeaux, Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography, Black American Literature Forum 25 (1991): 52560 (reprinted in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Robert OMeally, ed. [Columbia U. Press, 1998], 483512, and in Robert Walser, Keeping Time: Readings In Jazz History [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 416424). 39 Schuller, Early Jazz, 116.
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Abstract Louis Armstrong sang and played music with an expressive force that has defied times corrosive affects and musicologists analytic methods. While his work as an instrumentalist has received much attention in the scholarly literature, his work as a vocalist has not. In order to gain a complete grasp of Armstrongs contribution as an artist, we need to consider his singing. Moreover, his work as a scat vocalist challenges us to enrich our understanding of jazz improvisation by exposing musical data that standard musical notation omits. Using theoretical tools from applied linguistics to represent and analyze scat syllables, this research gives us a rich understanding of the technical resources at Armstrongs disposal. After an overview of relevant theoretical ideas from this field, the proposed method sheds light on Armstrongs vocal technique by guiding listeners through an analysis of Armstrongs singing on Skid Dat De Dat. Phonetic transcriptions and audio waveforms provide useful alternatives to standard musical notation, revealing the control Armstrong exerted over vocal timbre and the specific ways in which Armstrongs phrasing and articulation contribute to his swing. The analysis clarifies relationships between timbre and other musical elements, such as rhythm, dynamics, and pitch. The methods offered here gives jazz scholars new tools for analyzing timbre, phrasing, articulation, and accentuation. By bringing into perspective the multidimensional sound image that impelled musicians to create jazz, these methods can improve our understanding of the specific ways in which African American musicians and their imitators have used music as an expressive language, as a repertoire, as a tradition, and as a story that they tell about themselves and their people.

Louis Armstrong's early scat solo analyzed for timbral organization

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This article was downloaded by: [University of North Texas] On: 06 October 2013, At: 22:33 Publisher: Routledge

Jazz Perspectives Vol. 1, No. 2, November 2007, pp. 133165

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134 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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136 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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Givan, Duets for One, 190.

138 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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Example 1 Skid Dat De Dat, 22-bar AA9BA0 form.

140 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

Table 1 Skid Dat De Dat, call and response in arrangement of timbres.

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142 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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144 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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Example 3 Timbral scale of vowel sounds.

146 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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Jazz Perspectives Table 2 Stable English-language vowels.

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148 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

Table 3 Unstable English-language vowels.

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Jazz Perspectives Table 4 Acoustical features of stable English-language vowels: openness.

Least open (i.e. closed):

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150 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

Table 5 Acoustical features of stable English-language vowels: acuteness.

Moderately acute: Least acute:

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Jazz Perspectives Table 6 Acoustical features of stable English-language vowels: laxness.

Most relaxed (most tense):

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152 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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1(A) 1(A9) (A0)

dw_____ dw_______: dowi:

154 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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Example 4 Skid Dat De Dat, IIIA, first vocal break, transcription.

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156 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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Figure 1 Skid Dat De Dat, IIIA, first vocal break, waveform.

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158 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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Example 5 Skid Dat De Dat, IIIA9, second vocal break, transcription.

160 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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Figure 2 Skid Dat De Dat, IIIA9, second vocal break, waveform.

Example 6 Skid Dat De Dat, IIIA0, third vocal break, transcription.

dw_ dw___: dowi: