Mexico City Blues

A problem that surfaced around the time of the consolidation of 'bebop' was that of the position of the vocalist. With the new dissonant, chromatic, polyrhythmic lines of themes and improvisations strung over more complex rhythms, how could one sing the new music? Before, the basic jazz vocal repertoire had been drawn, in the main, from the blues in its various forms and the 32 bar standard popular song. These offered various options for a singer, (none of which were, perhaps, ever a hundred percent satisfactory). One could sing the song straight, framed by instrumental passages and solos, or bend and elongate the words to accommodate the accompanying harmonies and rhythms, or improvise new melodic lines to fit the existing words. But the new density achieved in bebop accentuated the problem. One solution was to use the voice as an instrument - to 'scat' nonsense syllables as an onomatopoeic melodic/rhythmic parallel to the soloists lines: 'The scat singer mouths nonsense syllables... just for the sounds they convey.' (MB, 185) This practice had been invented (allegedly) by Louis Armstrong in the 1920's. (1.) For a non-musician like Kerouac, this offered a method of joining in with the music, and/or creating one's own melodic lines, assuming that one's musical 'ear' was sophisticated enough: 'Jack ... loved scat singing, in which a vocalist accompanies a jazz solo, or creates his own by using his voice as an instrument.' (MB, 185)

But several other (related) attempts were initiated by singers to assimilate the new music of modern jazz. Two approaches are relevant for my purpose: Slim Gaillard's (2.) dadaist 'vouteroonie' vocals, and the style called 'vocalese.' In a famous passage in On the Road, Kerouac describes a typical Gaillard performance:

'Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying, 'Right-oroonie' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-oroonie.'... He does and says anything that comes into his head... he slowly gets up and... [continues]

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