Memoir
And All That Jazz — Part 2: The Girl Who Was Born to Sing Scat
How does a 28-year-old acquire a taste for an odd form of singing that originated in the early 1900s and then learn to excel at performing it?
When I was a little kid, my dad used to entertain the family sometimes with his hand-trumpet solos. He’d cup his hands and put them over his mouth, as if he were going to blow warm air into them on an icy winter day. Then he’d start projecting his voice into his hands and opening and closing his palms around the sounds that he emitted. To me it sounded like, “Woppa pappa doo wha-wha-wha. Woppa wee op, woppa wee-ow.”
I have no idea where he learned to do that. But it amused us all and I can still see and hear it in my mind all these 60-plus years later. The other thing I remember is that every time I would hear actors or singers referring to their “instrument” later in life, I would think of my dad and his hand-trumpet.
Fast forward to just a few weeks ago when my jazz musician friend Ben Rosenblum sent me his newsletter, announcing his show playing piano and accordion for singer Laura Anglade at the Chelsea Table and Stage in Manhattan. Midway through a mellow jazz ballad, Anglade launched into a scat run that reminded me of my dad and his gift, and provoked the same bemused mystery. I could never fathom where my father picked up his taste and talent for hand-trumpet, and now I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how Laura Anglade, a 28-year-old millennial from France, could have acquired her taste and talent for scat.
The Lowdown on Scat
For the uninitiated, scat is improvised jazz singing using the voice in imitation of an instrument, and singing nonsense syllables for each note instead of words. (By that definition, I guess my dad’s hand-trumpet performances were a form of scat!)
Some say Louis Satchmo Armstrong invented scat with his 1926 recording of a song called Heebie Jeebies. Legend has it that he dropped his sheet music with the lyrics and started improvising with the made-up sounds “scat-a-lee-dat.” More likely, though, the style was originated earlier in the 19th century by a jazz singer named Gene Greene in a song called “From Here to Shanghai.”
Who knows exactly where scat comes from? Suffice it to say it was born a long, long time ago, and that it’s strange but somehow fascinating to the human ear, especially when performed by artists who know what they’re doing.
You can count Laura Anglade among them. When I asked her how that came about, this is what she told me.
“Well, my parents named me after the jazz standard ‘Laura,’” she said. (Here’s Ella Fitzgerald singing the 1945 number.) This was in Montpellier, in the south of France, where she and her two younger siblings were born. Her father was a jazz-loving, guitar-playing ad man. “Ella and Sarah Vaughan were playing in the house all the time,” she recalled.
The family moved to Connecticut when Anglade was 5, and that was her home until she finished high school and then moved to Canada to study translation at Concordia University in Montreal. But it was in those formative childhood-through-adolescence years in Connecticut when she started to become the jazz artist she is today. She learned piano, took singing lessons and developed a taste for musical theater, falling in love with everything she saw and felt it would be like to be a part of that world.
One little problem, though. A giant wall stood between Anglade and the theatrical stage. “I was too shy,” she told me. Having seen her perform twice by now, I knew this story would have a happy ending. But not before the hero’s journey Anglade would have to take to overcome her inner turmoil. “I knew this was my thing,” she said. “But I didn’t know how to make it come out. I kind of had this bubbling passion way deep inside of me and I needed to find a way to externalize it.”
The Eureka! Moment
The breakthrough came when one of her music teachers, Matthew Surapine, played her a song called “I’ve Got Just About Everything,” sung by Bob Dorough, an American bebop and cool jazz vocalist, pianist and composer. Boxing legend Sugar Ray Robinson once hired Dorough for a tour when Robinson took a hiatus from prizefighting to try his hand at music.
To quell my curiosity, I googled Bob Dorough and gave his song a listen. Honestly, though, I couldn’t imagine what it was about Dorough’s singing that impressed either Sugar Ray or Laura. Imagine you’re back in around 1957 when your favorite uncle Harry takes the family out for a Sunday drive and starts singing along with the radio. He has a thin, undistinguished voice that’s notable for one thing: its utterly effortless happy-go-lucky, intoxicatingly joyful spirit. That’s what I got from it.
Turns out, it was kind of the same for Anglade. “I don’t know why, I don’t know how. It just affected me somehow,” she said. “It was just a very bright and happy song and I felt like I wanted to sing it. It opened my interest in jazz.” She was in 10th grade.
Not long afterward, the same teacher — Mattew Surapine — gave her the key to that easy-going sound. “Canta como se parla,” he told her in Italian: “Sing as you speak.” In other words, make your singing conversational, natural, like your speaking voice, with its own distinctive cadences. “So I developed my singing voice based on my speaking voice,” Anglade said.
Surapine introduced Anglade to the man who would become her mentor, a jazz pianist named David Lahm. Lahm’s mother, the American librettist and lyricist Dorothy Fields, who was the first woman inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, wrote more than 400 songs for Broadway and films, including the “The Way You Look Tonight.” Lahm himself gained notoriety for his interpretations of Joni Mitchell’s music. His contributions to the artist Anglade’s become had to do with the performance side of singing — learning how to act in front of an audience, how to breathe and precisely how to phrase lyrics. She sang a few bars of “The Way You Look Tonight” to show me what she meant: “Some day, when I’m awfully low, I will feel the glow…”
And scat? Where did that all start?
Learning the Language of Scat
“I learned it on the stage,” Anglade recalled. “During my university years, I started meeting and playing with a lot of jazz musicians, and I began to learn their language.”
“They say that, historically, scat started with singers using their voices to mimic instruments, like trumpets or saxophones,” Anglade explained, bringing my dad’s performances from my youth to mind. “But sometimes musicians also try to make their instruments sound like certain singers, trying to mimic the tones and textures of unique singing styles.” She offered saxophonist Lester Young accompanying Billie Holiday as a case in point. “Music and scat work symbiotically, as if a voice and an instrument are conversing with one another.”
Anglade’s true scat maestro is a jazz guitarist named Sam Kirmayer. (Here’s a clip of them performing together.) Something about the way he plays his chord patterns seeped into her head and took up residence there. “Do do do woo, do do do da,” she improvised.
“It’s like a language you fully immerse yourself in — a new language,” she said. “I look at scat like a vocabulary of syllables you learn, and then you just let go and let the sounds spill out.”
But’s it not random, she continued. “Like jazz, it’s rooted in patterns. I tell my students, ‘Try to scat in complete sentences. Give me something simple, and repeat it.”
And so, from a child listening to her family’s jazz records, to a shy girl seeking her own musical footing, to a young adult studying French-to-English translation while birthing her own jazz style, Anglade now seems to be living the life she was meant to live. She and her partner, bassist Jonathan Chapman, are planning to make the leap to living in New York and breaking into the jazz scene there this summer. How does she envision her future?
No Expectations
“I never had any expectations and still don’t,” she said. “Success can be measured in many ways, especially in jazz.”
She’s already performed with big names in the business, like Melody Gardot, for thousands of people. “But the next day I might play for five people in a nursing home. And if one of them comes up to me and says, ‘That was my husband’s favorite song,’ that means just as much to me.”
So many of us constantly chase the numbers, the approval, the validation — especially if we aspire for success in creative professions. In her life so far, and in the unknown future that awaits her in New York, Anglade seeks only to “entertain authentically.” “Whether you know it or not,” she said, “people can always tell when they’re experiencing an honest performance.”
“Making music for a living is a privilege to me,” Anglade told me. “But it’s not a choice. It’s something I need to be alive.”
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Takeaways
- Jazz is truly a continuing education subject. Whatever age you are when you realize you like it, you can spend the rest of your life learning to understand and appreciate it ever more deeply.
- As a late adopter when it comes to jazz, talking to jazz musicians has been my greatest source of understanding.
- Jazz singing is totally different from other vocal genres. Using Laura Anglade as an example, the differences include often singing with little or no vibrato. “I think of Chet Baker when he sang in that very flat, straight-tone style,” Anglade said. “I’m not sure there’s even a name for that sytle of jazz singing. He just sang the way his trumpet sounded.” Jazz singing also has distinctive phrasing, and a conversational relationship with accompanying musicians.
- Jazz for me embodies a sort of time-bending element. What I mean is, whether you’re listening to Billie Holiday, Charlie Bird or Ella Fitzgerald performing the music of their day, or 20-something artists today like Laura Anglade who add their own touches to classic numbers and original compositions alike, you can feel nostalgic or current or a combination of both.
Interested in learning more about jazz history, jazz music and the jazz life? Here are a few suggestions:
— “A Soft Reminder of Where Jazz Came From,” a primer on the not-so-pleasant places and experiences that gave rise to the genre, by jazz enthusiast and podcast producer Tom Platts.
— “Lady Sings the Blues,” a 1972 biographical movie about Billie Holiday, starring Diana Ross.
— “Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm,” the excellent 2022 debut novel by Laura Warrell about charismatic Boston jazz trumpeter Circus Palmer, who has no trouble attracting women, but huge challenges being a father to the daughter who idolizes him.
