Sunday, October 15, 2017

Hodgepodge 351/365 - Scat (as in Singing)

This evening we went out to a local wine tasting room near Cannery Row that we hadn't known about until David saw that an acquaintance, Scotty Wright, would be playing there. Scotty plays piano one-handed (following a stroke in 2011) and sings with a beautifully mellifluous voice. Tonight he was accompanied on bass by Joe Dolister and sax/clarinet by Stu Reynolds, both wow.

One thing Scotty is especially good at is scat, and he usually peppers some into whatever standard he starts out with. Like in this version of Cole Porter's "All of You," recorded in August at the same tasting room (the scat comes in at 6:58):


That got me thinking about other great scat singers.

There's Ella, of course (as one commenter on this video says, "A lot of people aren't hip to scat, but Ella is the GOAT at it"), here singing with Mel Torme, who ain't bad himself:


And Cab Calloway with "The Scat Song" (1932):


Or what about Sarah Vaughan singing "Scat Blues" (1969)?


And I'll end with Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye having a blast with "When the Saints Go Marching In" from the movie The Five Pennies (1959):




1 comment:

Kim said...

A one-armed piano player! What talent. And the scat samples here are a perfect touch.