Research On The Scat Singing Of Ella Fitzgerald

Scat singing is a manner of jazz vocal performance which was given birth in the begining of 20th century. The most important characteristic of scat singing is, singing with specific nonsense syllables to mimic the tone of instruments, and instantaneously improvising likely an instrument. In 1940s, following the then raising artistic jazz style, Bebop, scat singing had entered a stage of rapid development.The jazz legend female singer, Ella Fitzgerald, contributed a lot for scat singing. Ella absorbed scat skills from the fore runners in Swing Era, then studied from bebop musician to raise the philosophy of performance, as well the skills of improvisation, made scat singing a unique style of jazz performance, instead of simply a series of technologies.The thesis refer to some present theories of jazz improvisation to establish a model that reproducing the routine of scat singing improvising, from the choice of note in musical material, to the forming of each chorus, which reveals the feature of improvising in four layers of music. At last, to analyse Ella’s scat singing work "How High the Moon" through the model, and make conclusion.This thesis is divided into four chapters to be described. The first chapter of the history of scat singing and the career of Ella Fitzgerald, as well as the importance of Ella on scat singing; the second chapter of basic concept of jazz and the referencing theories of analysing jazz improvising; the third chapter of the model of jazz improvisation, of the skills in four layer:musical material choicing/fraction building/phrase building/chorus forming; the fourth chapter of analysing transcription of "How High the Moon" to verifing the model, and the conclusion of Ella’s philosophy of scat singing.The conclusion of this thesis is:Ella Fitzgerald was irreplaceable in the history of scat singing, she let the technique became a new music form, and use her works to obscure the boundary of Swing and Be-bop music, which essentially the boundary of commercial music and art music, and thus made Be-bop more acceptable in audiences.Besides, this thesis validate the applicability of the jazz analysis theory in improvisation.