Scat and vocalese are two approaches to jazz vocality. This essay intervenes into dominant narratives of their history, value, and functions and encourages us to conceptualize a broader, contradictory view of what they have been and done. This view both acknowledges the narrative of Louis Armstrong giving birth to scat in 1926 and that scat was widespread far earlier; it points to how scat has occupied both sides of Lindon Barrett’s binary of the singing/signing voice, variously functioning as institutionalized vocality that claims authority by Othering certain music as nonmusical and marginalized vocality denied legibility by hegemonic musical norms. Alongside these reflections on the cultural politics of jazz voice, the reader is guided through explorations of the scat existing before scat; the less-celebrated recordings of the most-celebrated scat singer, Ella Fitzgerald; and the ways scat’s meanings are reshaped by poetry and by lesser-known singers of the past and present.

Jackie McLean and Sonny Rollins take the same starting point of the early 1950s Miles Davis band, but then follow their stories through independently. Jackie talks of Richie Powell and the Cilfford Brown / Max Roach Band in which Sonny later played. Sonny reflects on a myriad of different ideas, from Elmo Hope and Ernie Henry to Pete LaRoca and Henry Grimes, looking in detail at his trios. Considering social protest, Sonny leads in to discussions with Abbey Lincoln about the era of We Insist! Freedom Now. Rollins then follows his career path through to the 2000s.

Chapter 7, ‘Most of My Sheroes Don’t Appear on a Stamp: Contextualising the Contributions of Women Musicians to the Progression of Jazz’, considers the vital part that women – both vocalists and instrumentalists – made to the development of jazz, although they have tended to be excluded from standard historiographical narratives of the genre. With a focus on the development of jazz in the United States, Tammy L. Kernodle considers women jazz musicians’ work from the early days of New Orleans jazz, through jazz in Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Europe, to the emergence of women jazz singers, including Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and to the all-girl swing bands of the 1940s.