Scat scoot Skeedum Doo

I did an interesting experiment the other day as I was sitting in my studio creating some art. (It's so nice to be back in the studio after a good two month hiatus as I dealt with some drastic carpal tunnel issues). Well, as you may have seen in previous blogs, I am keeping an on-going documentation of right brained flub-ups that occur when I blurt out the words to songs while deep in a creative zen. I find it fascinating how the words are floating in my mind, getting mixed up with the imagery that is being trancended through my finger tips and erupts ludicrously from my mouth. As in the past, I once again apologize to any musicians that I may have offended. (You can see that blog, by the way, if you go to my archives...I wrote it last September.)

But on this day, CBC had a radio documentary on about jazz, and you can't talk about jazz without talking about scat singing. Now, I highly recommend that if you are in the least interested in doing a google search of scatting, that you ensure that your filters are set at the highest restrictions and I beg that you include the word "singing" in the phrase or you will be as disgusted as I was. The world is an incredibly deplorable disturbing place....but I digress.

According to Wikipedia, (thank goodness for Wikipedia) scat singing is vocal improvization with nonsense syllables with random vocables.  I don't know about you, but when I think about jazz, just off the top of my head, I think of scat singing; bopdee-boops and the like. So, I decided to do a bit of a reverse of my usual song documentation experiment and instead, consciously tried to write down everything that the woman that happened to be scat singing at the time said. This is what I was able to get before I gave up:

Skitty-yo-ee-yo-yo-yo
Sumba-yah-yoy-oy
I-yooooo-pow-bow
Yeah-idi-oooooooo
A-yoy!

I shook my head, giggled and turned back to my art work, listening to the radio documentary and not giving it another thought.

Then today, I was driving down the road with my dog by my side. I just bought a new jacket at Value Village about a month ago and the fur is made out of llama and alpaca wool. My dog likes to sniff one specific spot on the sleeve of the jacket and I like to joke that she is sniffing the llama. Then I just started chanting to her and no one in particular:

Sniffin' the llama, sniffin' the llama, llama jacket, sandy's sniffinthellama, sniffinllama, lllllaaaaammmma, llama, llama, llllaaaaama.........

I was off on a monestary like tantric chant. I was scat singing about my llama jacket and it was fun. I then realized just how often I actually do scat sing, and I bet you do too. It's fun to just play around with words in our mouth and let them slip around in there and come out with unintended meaning, or absolutely no meaning at all. And it's very entertaining to do this "game" with kids, entertaining the idea of rhyming words and coming up with nonsensical, rhythmic gibberish. Hey, I'm no Ella Fitzgerald, and I certainly don't mean to deteriorate the fine art that is associated with scat singing. I'm the first to get offended when someone looks at an Abstract or Minimalist painting and say, "I could have done that" because ultimately, it comes down to appreciation.

I guess I just appreciate words. Wordery, birdery, doo bee, woo bee, woo bah, boo. Words.

Hoots the Owl on Sesame Street Teaches Scat Singing