Wallflower Order Sighting

Ishmael Reed is one of those writers that takes such a radical stance that it's hard to agree with all or some of his ideas. One that I can definitely agree with, however, is that western culture has worked very hard to take many blossoming art forms of the twentieth century and dull them to the point of irrelevancy. I've found one particularly poignant example during chorus.

Mr. Murphy and our student teacher announced that we would be singing "Satin Doll", a classic jazz song written by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. To excite us for the new song we would be practicing, our student teacher played a recording of famous jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald performing the song alongside the Duke Ellington orchestra. Here's the recording she showed us.

The song is soulful, and greatly benefited by the personality of Fitzgerald. Ellington and Strayhorn's composition is jazzy and exciting, making use of all the different sounds they have available. Although I loved this performance, I quickly realized we were not qualified to attempt a recreation.

My initial fears were proven correct when I looked over the copy of the sheet music (no the original of course, but an adaptation). The singer's boppin' melody had been changed to accommodate a four-part mixed choir, making the sound flatter and not allowing the performers to get lost in the song as Fitzgerald would. To compound the issue, instead of the sweeping reinforcement of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, we would be accompanied by the limited tones and sharp chords of a piano, resulting in a song that lacks any of the hearty flow present in the original.

I was ready to get over this and chalk all of it up to a bad adaptation that wasn't worthwhile, but then, halfway through the piece, there was a large scat session. For those of you who are unfamiliar with scat singing, it is when a jazz performer or singer takes a break from the chorus and verses to get lost in the rhythm of the piece. They vocalize this feeling of free-wheeling optimism by stringing nonsense words together in an improvised rhythm and order. An example would be Louis Armstrong taking a break from his trumpet to yell something like "Zoo-poo-doo wop bop-bow wop boo-boo." Something like this works perfectly with Jazz, but the entire point is missed here. By writing down in the music what the singer should specifically do while scatting, it guts the song of any believable soul.

A whole choral group improvising scat sounds terrible I admit, but that just shows why it doesn't work for this type of music. It just looks to me like an attempt by the old-fashioned "classical" demographic in the music industry to ship and sell the genre of Jazz, much like how the Wallflower Order seeks to remove the power of Jus Grew from the people.