There was once a drunk man at a wedding. Overcome by the experience and the atmosphere, he suddenly mistook himself for Frank Sinatra and lurched towards the stage. The bored band, who had seen him coming all night, simply played on - gazing at their shoes as this enthusiastic but tuneless goose tackled I've Got You Under My Skin without any regard whatsoever for the composer's intentions. Worse again, he didn't even know the words. "But no matter," he said with a leer, "I'll lilt it for yiz."
It was an ugly incident. The guests fled the dance-floor, the bride punched the groom, and "Ole Blue Eyes" threw up in a flower pot.
All by way of illustration that the vocalising techniques of scat and vocalese are some of the most difficult arts in the wide world of song. Certainly, they are disciplines which really ought to be left to the experts - and there are very few of those. Perhaps the best of them is Mark Murphy. From Syracuse, the infallibly hip-sounding Murphy can do things with the human voice that go well beyond singing in the conventional sense - what he does is jazz vocal improvisation rather than straight singing.
"Jazz must have a rhythmic pulse, sophisticated harmonics and that improvisational thing. If you get those three things, you get jazz. A jazz singer is someone who does that with his voice. It's just a gift you have. It can get mysterious. You have to just jump in - and there's a great deal of daring in it. But you have to know where you are. You have to know your chords. I scold some of my pupils because they don't know their chords and they're guessing. I used to be like that too but then I got more disciplined. It's a slow process and I didn't really get it together until I was in my 40s."
Scat is basically the vocal imitation of an instrumental solo. Vocalese is much the same except it usually involves the singing of actual words. The most famous vocalese is probably Moody's Mood For Love - a sung version of James Moody's saxophone solo on I'm In the Mood For Love. Just as the innovative horn players of early jazz had begun to play in the way a singer would sing, the scat and vocalese merchants took it a little further and began to imitate, with the human voice, the sounds of the horn players. It was revolutionary stuff. The devotees of vocalese used lyrics and the scat-singers stuck with extraordinary gushing outbursts of "eee-bops" and "skiddley-baps". The pioneers were hipsters such as Leo Watson, Slim Gaillard and Babs Gonzales, who fronted an outfit called Three Bips and a Bop. The unstoppable Gaillard even invented his own language in which to scat fluently, peppering his outbursts with his trademark "mc vouty oroonie oreenimo".
But while some were often at the comic end of the genre there were also serious heavyweights such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan who perfected techniques that added a whole new layer not just to dynamic performances, but also to the musical possibilities of "instrumental" jazz. Their voices really did become extra instruments.
Those more specifically associated with vocalese include Eddie Jefferson who wrote the lyrics to Moody's Mood For Love. From his early days as a singer with Coleman Hawkins, he was interested in writing lyrics suitable for already recorded improvisations. In fact, he was possibly the first to attempt it. King Pleasure may have made more of a name for himself but he was basically imitating Jefferson. The other big stars of the genre were Lambert, Hendricks and Ross - a hugely influential trio comprised of Dave Lambert, Annie Ross and Jon Hendricks who emerged in 1958 with a groundbreaking album called Sing A Song of Basie.
These were vocalese arrangements of Basie standards and they had a major impact on the vocal approach of young hipsters such as Georgie Fame. "Jon Hendricks is the godfather of all that. I try to make it sound like Johnny Griffin playing saxophone, or Chet Baker playing trumpet or Groove Holmes playing a Hammond Organ. In fact there was about five years in the 1960s when I couldn't sound like anybody other than Mose Allison. Everything sounded like Mose. I try to make my voice sound like an instrument, which it is. But it takes a lifetime to develop your own particular sound and style. But Jon Hendricks extended the range of the voice and now we don't care about what key you're singing in any more because, if its physically possible to do it, then you do it. People have preconceived ideas about what you can do musically or physically, but I gave that up 20 years ago."
Singers such as Fame and his heroes Jefferson and Hendricks are capable of making the most extraordinary noises. They have a different approach to singing, in much the same way as a saxophonist will not limit himself to the notional amount of notes available to him. It means the voice is used to go higher than it should and lower than it should - and this can be risky, not only musically, but physically.
"You have to be very careful with that," says Mark Murphy, "because it can be vocally injurious. The fact that I adapted classical technique to jazz has saved my vocal chords and any history of vocal strain that I had to battle with was to do with cigarette smoke. Everybody has a certain routine of funny noises you go through before you go out - to make sure your voice is there and so that your first vocal noise is not a squawk. There are tricks. If I'm having a bad night I drink a Coca-Cola which seems to keep the phlegm away. On really bad nights I keep a flask of beef or chicken broth which brings the voice right back - the salt and hot water." For any eager wedding singers hoping to attempt either scat or vocalese on the big day, you may wish to first investigate Oop-Pop-a-Da by Babs Gonzales or perhaps Louis Armstrong's recording of Heebie Jeebies.
The more adventurous/drunk might even attempt the extraordinary virtuosity of Bobby McFerrin - someone who even managed to get scat into the charts. As for the incredibly demanding discipline of vocalese, you might like to try Annie Ross's take on Twisted, but with one proviso - if you can't get past the first line without tripping over yourself, it might be as well to stay off the stage and leave us all alone. When it comes to things difficult, a wedding reception is not the place to try to outpace your talents.