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Louis Armstrong's “Skid Dat De Dat”:Timbral Organization in an Early ScatSoloWilliam BauerPublished online: 24 Apr 2008.

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Louis Armstrong’s ‘‘Skid Dat De Dat’’:Timbral Organization in an Early ScatSoloWilliam Bauer

In one of the first and most influential examples of jazz musicology, the 1968 book

Early Jazz, Gunther Schuller observes that Louis Armstrong’s 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 Armstrong’s singing as

‘‘but a vocal counterpart of his playing,’’ and by devoting all of the musical examples

in the chapter to Armstrong’s 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 comparison’s direction. Consider the

formative role singing played in Armstrong’s musical development and career.2 Then

think of the enormous impact that Armstrong’s 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 trumpeter’s 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 Armstrong’s singing can give us a key to

understanding his work, both as a performer and as an instrumentalist. Yet, apart

1 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), 4–5, 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 Schuller’s

general preoccupation with progress as an ideal—and, more specifically, with its significance in both the

jazz aesthetic and in jazz history—lead 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), 142–143.4 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), 25–26.

Jazz PerspectivesVol. 1, No. 2, November 2007, pp. 133–165

ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online # 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/17494060701611809

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from a recent article by Benjamin Givan, the literature contains no substantial

analyses of Louis Armstrong’s 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 Armstrong’s 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 distinctive—indeed, a highly

personal—approach 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 ‘‘America’s 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 Armstrong’s Vocal Recordings,’’ The Musical Quarterly 87

(Summer 2004): 188–218. 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

Armstrong’s ‘Hotter Than That,’’’ I have put forth some reasons why Armstrong’s 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 Fitzgerald’s ‘‘St. Louis Blues,’’ 1957–1979 [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], 57–67);

Hao Huang and Rachel Huang, ‘‘Billie Holiday and Tempo Rubato: Understanding Rhythmic

Expressivity, Annual Review of Jazz Studies 7 (1994–95): 181–199; Milton Stewart, ‘‘Stylistic

Environment and the Scat Singing Styles of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan,’’ Jazzforschung/Jazz

Research 19 (1987): 61–76. In addition, see Robert Cogan, New Images of Musical Sound (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 35–38, Barry Kernfeld, What to Listen for in Jazz (New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 167–68, and Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of

Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 527–546. Each of these latter sources have

passages devoted to the analysis of Billie Holiday’s singing.

134 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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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 explorations—especially

those of singers—did 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 ofsounds, i.e., upon the vocalization of pleasingly barbaric noises. It is notuncommon for whole choruses to be sung without words, but it is unusual if a hotjazz singer does not interpolate his own leering, raucous noises into someinoffensive and self-respecting chorus. In the occasional chorus which [sic] is sungwith all its words, the singer is bound to repeat the melody the second time with anungodly imitation of musical instruments as divinely insane as the human larynxwill permit. Wordless mimicry of well-known sounds arouses the blood of listenersto say this is ‘‘hot stuff.’’ ‘‘Ukulele Ikes’’ come into existence, not because they cansing, but because they can make weird and terrifying noises. Any unorthodoxinstrumentation is fair if it will create heat. Horrible shrieks, oily moans, andstaccato screams will set the blood boiling and give the singer a reputation for being‘‘hot.’’9

Hart’s 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 singer’s violation of the composer’s ‘‘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 wall—between the composed and the improvised, the instrumental

and the vocal—that 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.

Hart’s 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. Hart’s 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.

Jazz Perspectives 135

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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 have—a

discussion I will not take up here—scat 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 performer’s own—a sound as distinctive as that of

the performer’s own voice—the 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 small-

dimension movement. This movement, in turn, sustains the solo’s 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 different—and

much the poorer, I think—in 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

singer’s 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 listener’s 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 work’s

syntactical logic emerge from such a bland procession of sounds?

From Hart’s 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

136 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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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 Armstrong’s (and by extension,

other artists’) singing has been musical notation’s 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 improviser’s

timbral production (the phonemic aspect) to the listener’s 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 Armstrong’s vocal

performances shows how this particular branch of linguistics can give us a richer

understanding of the technical resources at this singer’s disposal. The analysis

includes such details as the role of the tongue’s position in creating timbral variation

in speech and in song, in order to show how Armstrong’s vocal technique relates to

the acoustical result that delights the ear.

Despite my methodology’s 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 Armstrong’s 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 Armstrong’s 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 another—and beyond the surface idiomatic

technical virtues and limitations of any given instrument, including the voice—no

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.

Jazz Perspectives 137

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published by Playboy magazine in 1964, the saxophonist Julian ‘‘Cannonball’’

Adderley expressed a commonly held viewpoint:

I don’t know just what [a] jazz singer is. What does the term mean? We’ve had ourBillie Holidays, Ella Fitzgeralds, and Mildred Baileys, and Sarah Vaughns [sic], butthey’ve been largely jazz oriented and jazz associated. Any real creative jazzinnovation has been done by an instrumentalist. In other words, to me, jazz is aninstrumental music, so that, although I’ll go along with a term like jazz oriented, Idon’t 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 Adderley—whose many talents did not include innovation—can

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

progress—rather 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 Armstrong’s 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 America’s

popular music. Any sample of Armstrong’s 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), 279–80. 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, 29–31, 34–38, 56, 58, and 139–41.12 Ibid.13 Emphasis added.

138 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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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 form’s unusual length comes from its six-measure A sections, which split

into two unequal parts: two measures of unaccompanied soloing—‘‘breaks’’ marked

‘‘NC’’ (No Chord) in Example 1—followed 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 bridge’s 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 call-

and-response format, plaintive mood, and melodic idiom, as well as the move to the

subdominant at the start of the tune’s 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 tune’s

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, Armstrong’s opening unaccompanied solo strikes the ear so

14 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 four-

note motto from the fourth movement of Mozart’s ‘‘Jupiter’’ Symphony. That said, this similarity alone

does not establish Mozart’s work as the source for this idea.

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

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strongly as an introduction, the Armstrong historian/discographer Edward Brooks

does not include it in the arrangement’s 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 arrangement’s 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 (0:00–0:06), Armstrong sets up the tune’s call-and-

response format by performing the first break. His break in A9 (0:12–0:18) helps to

reinforce this format. However, after the bridge, at the start of A0 (0:33–0:37), 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 (0:44–0:49), Lil Hardin in the repeat at A9 (0:56–1:01), and Johnny Dodds

again in the last one, A0 (1:16–1:20). 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 tune’s form—which, as we have seen, does not even

conform to a standard format in itself.

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

CHORUSA (mm. 1–6)call/response

A9 (mm.7–12)call/response B (mm.13–16)

A0 (mm.17–22)call/response

I Tpt./ens. Tpt./ens. Ensemble Tbn./ens.0:00–0:12 0:12–0:25 0:25–0:33 0:33–0:44

II Cl./ens Pno./tpt.+ens. Ensemble Cl./tpt.+ens.0:44–0:56 0:56–1:08 1:08–1:16 1:16–1:27

III Vcl./cl.+ens. Vcl./tbn.+ens. Cl.+ens. Vcl./cl.+ens.1:27–1:38 1:38–1:51 1:51–1:58 1:58–2:11

IV Tbn./tpt.+ens. Tbn./tpt.+ens. Ensemble Tpt./ens.2:11–2:22 2:22–2:34 2:34–2:42 2:42–2:54

Coda: Vcl./ens.2:45–3:01

16 Edward Brooks, The Young Louis Armstrong on Records: A Critical Survey of the Recordings, 1923–1928

(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 (0:48–0:56), as before. However, in the

A9 section (0:56–1:08), Armstrong solos over the chorale-like texture. The

introduction of a new line here generates small-dimension movement. But as with

Ory’s unexpected entrance in the first chorus (0:33–0:37), the introduction of a new

instrumental timbre here obscures the underlying chorus structure. During the A0

section (1:16–1:27), 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 music’s middle-dimension growth.

The sequence of entrances in the next chorus (1:27–2:11) makes the form

somewhat more audible, largely because Armstrong’s vocal breaks follow a more

predictable course. Indeed, the scat solo’s 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 1:51–1:58). In this chorus, Armstrong sets all

three of the A phrases in motion with scat vocal breaks (at 1:27–1:32, 1:38–1:44, and

1:58–2:04). Johnny Dodds, Kid Ory, and, after the bridge, Dodds again, each answer

him in turn (at 1:31–1:38, 1:43–1:51, and 2:03–2:11, 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

Armstrong’s 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 (2:11–2:54) complements the first one,

with Kid Ory taking the first two breaks (2:11–2:15 and 2:22–2:27) and Armstrong

taking the last (2:42–2:47). 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 large-

dimension growth that runs from the trumpet question that launches the

performance to the vocal answer that brings the performance home. Amid all of

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the structural ambiguities, Armstrong’s instrumental and vocal passages—especially

the unaccompanied ones—provide 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 Armstrong’s rhetorical delivery,

which suggests that the story’s emotional trajectory started well before the music’s

first note sounds, Armstrong urges listeners to reach beyond the music’s structure

into black American culture’s 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 story’s plea to identify with—indeed, to empathize with—the 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 listener’s experience of Armstrong’s vocal solo, I

have isolated it in Example 2. The example shows Armstrong’s 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 mind’s ear after the solo has

ended, this example allows the reader to survey Armstrong’s scat solo in chorus III all

at once, or synchronically. Insofar as the chart aids the listener’s 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

Armstrong’s 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 vocable’s 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 vocable’s beginning, sustain, and ending in relation to the

music’s 4/4 meter and the musical pulse, which generally moves at a pace of 120–122

beats per minute.

From Example 2, we can gain an understanding of the mechanisms by which Louis

Armstrong executed certain actions—the timing of the release, flow, and interruption

of his air stream, for example—to 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 beat—at 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 Armstrong’s 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 [Armstrong’s] horn breaks.’’17 I would shift the emphasis

here and argue that all of the vocal breaks move Armstrong’s 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 song’s

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.

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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 vowel’s distinctive acoustical structure. Formants interest

us here because they link the singer’s production of vocal timbre (the phonemic

aspect) with the listener’s 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

18 Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot, Sonic Design: The Nature of Sound and Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice Hall, 1976), 457–459.19 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 consonants—despite a ‘‘noise-like’’ character that derives

from their indefinite fundamental pitch and the complexity of their waveform—have 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, Armstrong’s vocal technique grows out of his American English pronunciation,

and specifically American-South and African American dialects. Because Armstrong’s 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 speaker’s 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 Armstrong’s Reinvention of an

American Popular Song,’’ in the ‘‘Online Proceedings of the Colloque Interdiscipliaire de Musicologie,’’

l’Observatoire International de la Creation Musicale, l’Universite de Montreal, http://www.oicm.umon-

treal.ca/cim05/cim05_articles/BAUER_W_CIM05.pdf (accessed July 29, 2007); ‘‘Scat Singing: A

Timbral and Phonemic Analysis,’’ Current Musicology 64 (2003): 303–323; 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.

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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.’’

Example 3 Timbral scale of vowel sounds.

21 See Charles Seeger, ‘‘Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-Writing,’’ The Musical Quarterly 44 (April

1958): 184–195, 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, 4–5, 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 Trubner and Co.,

1869; reprint, Kraus Reprints and Periodicals (February 1972).

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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 people—indeed, these skills must operate so,

in order for us to convey and grasp meaning in real time—listeners 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 Armstrong’s 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’’ /dæd/, 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 tongue’s 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 timbre—as 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 instrument—or 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 singer’s 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 Slawson’s 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.

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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 tongue’s 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 /æ/. The second

column from the left shows the tongue’s 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/,

respectively—a convention that shows this transcription system’s 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 Jones’s 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 (March–December 2005): 13–44. But in applied linguistics, the vowel quadrilateral still

serves a practical function: instructing non-native speakers in English language pronunciation.

Table 2 Stable English-language vowels.

Tongue’s Articulation Lips’ Articulation Phoneme Assonant word

High Front Spread_______ /iy/ deedHigh Front Neutral /i/ didMid Front Spread_______ /ey/ dateMid Front Neutral /e/ deadLow Front Neutral /æ/ DadMid Center Neutral / / dudLow Center Neutral /a/ dotMid Back Neutral /oh/ dogMid Back Round_______ /ow/ doteHigh Back Neutral /u/ tookHigh Back Round_______ /uw/ do

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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 Armstrong’s formants correlate his vocal

production with the listener’s 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 singer’s 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 sound’s openness due to a

drop in the first formant frequency.26 In other words, the listener’s 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 /æ/ serves as

the nucleus for nearly a quarter of the solo’s vocables. As with the bell of a trumpet,

which a horn player can either mute or leave open, Armstrong’s vowel choices

increase or decrease the degree to which his vocal instrument releases or holds back

his tone’s openness. Incidentally, speaking of mutes, Joseph ‘‘Tricky Sam’’ Nanton’s

26 Slawson’s use of the term ‘‘Openness’’ in place of Jakobsen’s 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), 658–661.

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).

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.

Table 3 Unstable English-language vowels.

Tongue’s Articulation Lips’ Articulation Phoneme Assonant

Low/Center to High/Front Neutral to Round /ay/ (/a/iy) dieLow/Front to High/Back Neutral to Round /æw/ (/æ/uw) doubtMid/Back to High/Front Neutral to Spread /oy/ (/oh/iy/) toyHigh/Front to High/Back Spread to Round /yuw/ (/iy/uw/) dew

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‘‘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 Ellington’s famous 1940

recording of ‘‘Koko.’’

Hearing the second formant frequency results in the sensation of a vowel’s

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 vowel’s

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 solo’s

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 singer’s 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 4 Acoustical features of stable English-language vowels: openness.

Most open: /æ/ (Dad)/a/ (dot)/oh/ (dog)

Moderately open: /ey/ (date)/e/ (dead)/ / (dud)/ow/ (dote)

Least open (i.e. closed): /iy/ (deed)/i/ (did)/u/ (took)/uw/ (do)

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A vowel’s 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 vocalist’s 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 solo’s 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 multi-

syllable 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, phonetic—but, by inference, phonemic—about 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 Terry’s 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 60366-

1-E, 1984, compact disc).

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

Most acute: /iy/ (deed)/i/ (did)/ey/ (date)/e/ (dead)/æ/ (Dad)

Moderately acute: / / (dud)/a/ (dot)

Least acute: /oh/ (dog)/ow/ (dote)/u/ (took)/uw/ (do)

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Armstrong’s Vocal Performance

The lyrics of Louis Armstrong’s 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 vocable’s 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 arrangement’s 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 one’s ear engaged in

Armstrong’s 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 Armstrong’s recording with this particular group of musicians, on that particular day, at that

particular site.

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

Least relaxed (i.e., most tense): /iy/ (deed)/ey/ (date)/æ/ (Dad)/oh/ (dog)/ow/ (dote)/uw/ (do)

Moderately relaxed: /i/ (did)/e/ (dead)/a/ (dot)/u/ (took)

Most relaxed (most tense): / / (dud)

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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.

Armstrong’s 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 /æ/, 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 /æ/ throughout the solo also serves a structural function

by giving Armstrong’s 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. Armstrong’s 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 solo’s concentrated palette of tone colors heightens the impact of Armstrong’s

sonic inventiveness. Table 7 shows that, from only two-thirds of the fifteen vowel

30 Ibid.

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Table 7 Frequency and relative length of vowels in ‘‘Skid Dat De Dat,’’ Chorus III.

Vowel Total Distribution Relative duration Comment

iy 2 1(A) 1(A0) diy_____ diy_____: Consistently sung with long durationsi 1 1(A9) di___ (di__|dow_____.) Latter occurrence phrased short-longey – Never occurse – Never occursæ 8 4(A) 2(A9) dæ_: dæ___|: dæ___: |dæ___ dæ___:|dæ___: Occurs on downbeats 26

2(A0) dæ *æ_____|_____. In *dæ_dl_æ_____|_____. Last vowel sound of solobreak

a 4 2(A9) 2(A0) da_____|___: da_____: da_: da_: Smeared in 1st occurrence; Phrased 26 in shortdurations

2 2(A0) d : d __ No pattern in phrasing, sung with varying durations.oh 4 2(A) 2(A0) *oh_____: doh_____: doh_: doh_|_: In *dæ___dl_oh_____:ow 3 1(A) 2(A9) |dow_____. dow_:_|dow_____. 26 phrase endings on downbeatsu 5 2(A) 3(A9) du: du_: du_ du____: du_: Consistently sung with short durationsuw – Never occurs

Diphthongsay – Never occursæw 2 1(A) 1(A9) dæw_____ dæw_______: Consistently sung with long durationsowi (oy) 1 (A0) dowi: ‘‘doit’’yuw – Never occurs

Other:*dl_____ 2 (A, A0) dl_____ dl_____ Transitional consonant /l/ (lateral approximant)Total 34

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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 /æ/. 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 break—and, indeed, by singing it twice

there—Armstrong 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 /æ/ sound. Again, timbre helps

to round out the solo. Yet the /æ/ 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 /æ/, 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 /æ/ now serves, that more lies ahead.

Pitch does play a role in the listening experience, of course, and Armstrong’s

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 voice’s rising and falling

into a vibrant musical expression. In the absence of such timbral variation, a

musician’s 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 language’s

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 Armstrong’s vocal line with his characteristic

rhythmic energy.

In Early Jazz, Gunther Schuller points out that Armstrong’s articulation

contributes markedly to his swing by delineating each sound’s 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

Armstrong’s singing shown in Figure 1 (produced using the audio production

freeware Audacity) illustrates Schuller’s point. This illustration exposes in graphic

detail the ‘‘microscopic’’ silences that etch Armstrong’s sounds in stark relief.

In representing the sound envelope, the waveform conveys information about the

attack, sustain, and decay of Armstrong’s vocal tone. The waveform’s 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 Armstrong’s 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 Armstrong’s

performance that standard notation leaves out.

Gunther Schuller has written impressionistically about Armstrong’s 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, themanner in which he releases the note, and the subsequent split-second silencebefore the next note—in other words, the entire acoustical pattern—present incapsule 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 Armstrong’s craft. By displaying the envelope of each

sound Armstrong produced with his voice, Figure 1 also shows that Schuller’s

observations hold true not only for Armstrong’s instrumental work, but for his

singing as well. Specifically, Figure 1 reveals the rhythmic impact of Armstrong’s

33 Schuller, Early Jazz, 116.

31 Schuller, Early Jazz, 91.32 Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1989), 859.

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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 consonants—the

labial /p/ or alveolar /t/, for example—glottal 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 phrases—‘‘I can’T 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’’).

Armstrong’s 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 multi-

syllabic English words.

The waveform also reveals rhythmic nuances that standard notation fails to show.

The repeated pitches that launch the scat solo (sung on /dæ/, /dæ/, /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 pitch’s 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

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

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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 /dæ/ and /du/, land squarely on

the beat. Armstrong reveals here how strongly his internal metric impulse governs the

break’s 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 /dæ/, /dl/, and /oh/ to produce a three-syllable

‘‘word’’ /dædloh/. 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 smear’s novelty sears the passage into the

listener’s 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 B-

flat. The C-natural’s 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 sounds—in effect using it as a stepping-

stone on his way to the ensuing downbeat—Armstrong 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 break’s 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 /æ/ 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

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coloration.34 In this first break, after singing two repeated G4s on the vowel /æ/, 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 /æ/ 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 listener’s

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 /æ/ 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 Armstrong’s 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 phrase’s

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 increas-

ingly 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 instrument’s 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 music—pitch,

dynamics, rhythm, and timbre—with the ease that an alchemist unites earth, air, fire,

35 LaRue, Guidelines for Style Analysis, 142–143.

34 In an interview with Leslie Gourse, which appears in Louis’ Children: American Jazz Singers (New

York: William Morrow and Company, 1984), 142–147, 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 Gourse’s book

contains insights into Terry’s approach to teaching jazz performance, both as an instrumentalist and as a

singer.

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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 Armstrong’s

work. To be sure, in all of Armstrong’s 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 scale’s 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 solo’s narrative. Armstrong’s 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 equal-

tempered tuning and sings an extended smear that pours across the barline into the

next measure. In the solo’s 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 small-

dimension movement.

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

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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, /dæw/, 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

breaks—dropping down to D3, a 12th lower than the break’s 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

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

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

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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 sub-

phrase’s 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 solo’s 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

break’s last vocable chain, /dædlæ/, 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 solo’s finish line.

Parallels between Instrumental and Vocal Timbre

If we rewind to the start of the performance, we can hear Armstrong’s 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.

Figure 3 ‘‘Skid Dat De Dat,’’ IIIA0, third vocal break, waveform.

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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 Armstrong’s 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

Armstrong’s trumpet playing is merely the instrumental counterpart of his singing,

and thereby flip around Schuller’s comparison completely, would seem absurd.

Wasn’t 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 Schuller’s subtle

condescension of Armstrong’s singing on its head. But I challenge the assumption

behind Schuller’s methodology. Aesthetically, Armstrong’s singing and his trumpet

playing stand on equal footing.

If any question remains regarding the ways that a researcher’s biases can influence

his or her methodology, turn to Schuller’s 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 Armstrong’s

opening break, which seems to start in a different key from the tune, Schuller suggests

that the innovator anticipates Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘‘out-of-key’’ break on ‘‘I Can’t Get

Started.’’ In the entire passage, Schuller never once mentions Armstrong’s vocal

performance. I will address elsewhere the flaws of the first point, which echoes Andre

Hodier’s criticism of Johnny Dodds and Kid Ory.37

Schuller’s 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 Schuller, Early Jazz, 105–06.37 Andre Hodier, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 49–62.

162 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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consistency of the musical language that links Armstrong’s 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 lick’s 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 Armstrong’s greatness in terms of the musical progress Armstrong spurred

as an instrumentalist, Schuller missed other critical aspects of Armstrong’s music—

such as his singing—that 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 improviser’s

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. Armstrong’s

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 accentua-

tion that governs both Armstrong’s 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.

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popularized such as doits, smearing, bending, scooping, shaking, and growling

continue to make a substantial contribution to the jazz instrumentalist’s 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, Armstrong’s

seminal role in the development of early jazz styles remains beyond doubt. We all

have much to learn, then, from listening closely to Armstrong’s 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

Observatoire International de la Creation Musicale (OICM) and the Faculty of Music

at University of Montreal, all of which provided forums for presentations of this

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): 525–60 (reprinted in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Robert O’Meally, ed.

[Columbia U. Press, 1998], 483–512, and in Robert Walser, Keeping Time: Readings In Jazz History

[New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 416–424).39 Schuller, Early Jazz, 116.

164 Timbral Organization in an Early Scat Solo

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Abstract

Louis Armstrong sang and played music with an expressive force that has defied

time’s 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 Armstrong’s 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

Armstrong’s disposal. After an overview of relevant theoretical ideas from this field,

the proposed method sheds light on Armstrong’s vocal technique by guiding listeners

through an analysis of Armstrong’s 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 Armstrong’s 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 multi-

dimensional 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.

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