Word: scat
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...breathe through her ears. Her range goes from lower owl to upper sparrow. Her voice sounds all of 20 years old. Her manner, for all her speed, is soothing. Just when you think she might be turning into Bonnie Baker, however, she kicks the lid off and begins to scat: "Scoodee...
...chair professor of the art of scat singing, wherein a singer abandons comprehensible lyrics in the middle of a song, and she can scoodee-oo-da for 800 bars without running out of fresh gibberish. For added sparks, she tosses in little shards of the classics, such as, say, a bit of the William Tell Overture. Then suddenly she turns to a robust fragment of Did You Ever...
...Swingle Singers' musical idiom is onomatopoeia, otherwise known in the trade as scat. Scat is like baby talk with a beat and is as old as singing in the shower. Rendered by a jazz stylist like Ella Fitzgerald, who reels off such breathless improvisations in Flying Home as "oodla-oodlee-ooblee-day-lay do-dee-a-din-doi-oodlay-a-din-doi-danzoit-boy-hem," scat can be a highly refined...
...Swingle Singers, however, sing it straight in the most elementary scat dialect-mainly "da-ba, da-ba" and "doo-boo, doo-boo," with an occasional "papa-da, chin-chin" or "waap" tossed in for special accents. While the revved-up tempo calls for a certain amount of vocal gymnastics, they stick faithfully to the score and never improvise. In fact, their allegiance is much more to Bach than it is to jazz. Their approach is restrained, respectful, and marked by finely honed precision and musicianship...
...superior, they are clearly intelligible. As Mabel, the perky fiancee of Frederic, the dutiful pirate's apprentice, Marion Studholme pours lyric intensity into Poor Wandering One to make it the evening's high sigh spot. As Major General Stanley, spindle-thin Eric House tackles the greatest polysyllabic scat song of the 19th century and "in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral" he is never tongue-tried. But Frederic, as played by Andrew Downie, is more arch boulevardier than sheltered buccaneer...