Now… Scat!

A telephone call on Monday evening with an old friend caused me to unearth a few memories from my musical past. One of them was of playing keyboards in a local Blues band back in Southampton, and I spotted another link between music and writing.

I probably need to back up a little, so bear with me.

Walter Murch is a renowned editor, sound designer and director who mixed the sound of many well-known films, including Apocalypse Now. He has written about an interesting approach to sound mixing, and you can find his words here.

I read that article many years ago, and was fascinated by it. Not only was it an insight into a glimpsed and glamorous world I yearned to join (I was studying film music back then), but it also seemed to resonate in other ways. I’d long realised that several of the things I loved or was good at when at school had something in common: patterns. I studied mathematics at university, and at school I’d been pretty good at German as well as English – and I now work in software engineering. It seems to me that a facility with patterns links all of these… and it also links them to music.

Having already convinced myself that music was similar to spoken language because of its structured nature, reading Murch’s essay and seeing dialogue and music put at opposite ends of a spectrum and labelled “encoded sound” and “embodied sound” gave me a bit of a jolt. But it made me pause and question why I’d hitherto placed music into the same box as writing and speaking.

I’d already been performing in bands for some time, and was beginning to become comfortable with playing keyboards. If you’ve learned to drive, to ride a bicycle, or to solve a Rubik’s Cube, then you’ll know that after enough practice the object feels like a literal extension of your body. This is how it is with musical instruments too, except that when it comes to a musical performance – especially in front of an audience – there’s another layer to it all: the instrument is speaking your words, in its own voice.

Obviously this is metaphorical. Music is not a literal spoken language, but it does have spelling, syntax and grammar. It has meter; tone; inflection; volume. In my view, the musician’s act of creating the sound from the instrument is like an author’s relationship with a fictional character.

When I play a solo in a band, it’s as if the keyboard is making a speech while I stand there churning out the pages and handing them over just in time for each sentence. I’m writing the dialogue. That nobody can actually read what it says is arguably moot because it’s written in soul language, not brain language.

So, here’s the question that occupied me after my phone call: what happens to this analogy when I scat-sing?

For those in the dark, I’m not speaking of the sort of sounds you hear when the great Louis Armstrong is holding court, nor of the astonishing balletic syllable-dancing of Ella Fitzgerald – in those cases the idea is to imitate an instrument. The scat singing to which I refer is similar, but more like a duet. You and your instrument sing together, usually in unison.

In my experience and humble opinion, scatting a solo is one of the most sublime experiences available to a stage musician. Whenever I’ve felt the need to do it and let rip, there’s invariably been an almost tangible and strangely magical connection to the audience. A few people may cheer or clap a little, or the level of background conversations may drop suddenly as people begin to listen. Why is that?

Perhaps scat-singing a solo is like subverting the form in fiction. If you’re reading a story and the main character breaks off to speak to the author, there’s a sense of discontinuity – but quite often appreciation, too, if you’re the sort of reader who revels in that sort of game. And if you’re listening to someone play a solo in a band you might not be consciously aware that there’s a language to the music – but, deep down, your soul knows it. So, when the scat begins, the fourth wall is broken: what was once music is revealed to be, after all, something with a spoken structure to it. Admittedly, there may not be any real words involved – the performer is mimicking the music with vocal approximations, using what sound like random syllables or nonsense words, but are actually a loving tribute to the instrument being played.

I find it hard not to compare this to an author taking a cameo role in their own story – or perhaps writing notes in the margin to explain the character’s actions. Either way, the writer is involved in an unexpected way, just as a scat-singing soloist is drawing attention to their spooky prescient ability to predict what the instrument will “say” next.

Of course, I can’t do it here, because blogging is a monologue. Here, I’m the main character and breaking off to talk to myself might be seen as misplaced egotism – so I’ll have to be content with an instrumental rhapsody.