King Pleasure - Vocalese - Anyone like this style?

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Eyeball · #1 Post by **Eyeball** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 4:36 pm

http://www.tuxjunction.net/media/moodloveKP.mp3

Vocalese - This is a popular and very hip style of Jazz singing in which the vocalist sings words to the melody and variations of a Jazz recording or song that never had lyrics to begin with. (Much more history than I am going to go into here.)

The simplest style is simply writing a lyric to a tune that never had a lyric or had a lyric so lame that few people ever sang it.

The 'bestest' style is when a singer has written a lyric that exactly fits a Jazz solo or melody from a previously recorded record.

One of the most famous and best of the lot was this recording by a singer called King Pleasure who recorded this classic early 50s side which had been originally recorded by tenor saxophonist James Moody and called "Moody's Mood for Love" which was his Jazz version of the well known pop tune "I'm In the Mood for Love".

Moody played his variations on the tune and it was a smash hit. Very tuneful and if you know the original song, you can hear that he is playing variations on it and quoting from it freely. Quite pleasing.

A singer/songwriter named Eddie Jefferson wrote a semi-new lyric that exactly fit all the variations James Moody had played on his record of the tune. Jefferson recorded it, but nothing much happened. King Pleasure recorded it and it was a sensation!

Few people had ever heard anything like this. KP has a captivating singing voice and it is not an easy thing to sing a lyric written to match a melody that was never intended to be sung, but conceived as something to be played...and spontaneously, too.

The recording is all King Pleaure's, except for the 'release' which is sung by Blossom Dearie, which on the James Moody recording was a piano solo. Nice change of pace.

You may or may not dig it the first time or so, but maybe you will. It's a Jazz vocal classic. King Pleasure did a number of other fie tunes, but nothing ever came close to this one.

http://www.tuxjunction.net/media/moodloveKP.mp3

I hope you enjoy it. I can listen to it over and over again. And I think I will right now!

#2 Post by **JesseMiner** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 8:23 pm

I personally love listening to this style, but the tracks that go over well with dancers are few and far between. I do occasionally spin select tracks by King Pleasure, Lamberts, Hendricks and Ross and Eddie Jefferson.

Some examples:

"Red Top" by King Pleasure (King Pleasure Sings)
"Charleston Alley" by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross (The Hottest New Group In Jazz)
"Take The A-Train" by Eddie Jefferson (Letter From Home)

Swinging!

Jesse

Albert System · #3 Post by **Albert System** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 6:51 am

I personally cannot stand it. I find it to be the polar opposite of "hip"... which is to say- pretenious as all heck.

Not to be critical.........

kitkat · #4 Post by **kitkat** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 9:55 am

Tough call. After listening to 6 albums' worth of Mills Brothers on my commutes to work this fall, trying to sort out the dance-DJing keepers from the tracks to toss, I sure did get a lot of "Don't play them, because they won't go over well with most people, but don't throw them out, because I love them!" tracks.

This way of not-quite-scatting blew me away. I loved their--as well as Slim & Slam's--use of long real English words rather than the conventional "doo bee doo bee da da bee bop" scat! I think part of what I love is how they often intersperse them with "real lyrics," unlike the way I usually hear scatting done.

Come to think of it, my love for this isn't at all surprising. As a kid, I was absolutely enamored with oldies like "Who Put The Bom In The Bom Ba-Bom-Ba-Bom," though arguably those syllables are more like scat than like words.

Oh, and in trying to find a sample Mills Brothers track to quote, I'm realizing that they were actually scatting non-word syllables--they were just throwing them in with lyrics that barely made sense and never letting the non-word scatting last more than a measure or two.

And Slim & Slam, well, I guess it's a bit of a stretch there, too: "Vout" isn't exactly a word, but it does sound more like a word than traditional scat syllables with their initial Ds & Bs do! Ditto for "oroonie" and "oreenie"--they don't quite sound ilke normal scat, and though they're not English words, they're 3-syllable utterances that sound more like they could be a word than "ba-dee-ba" does.

I also found a Jimmie Lunceford tune where Willie Smith did the same thing--check out these words thrown in as a B part between the A-part lyrics!

Willie Smith wrote:Nagasaki, boo-da-rack-ie, take it on the wacky
Solid Jack
Don't give me that back-to-back
Just leave it for Hackensack
Fujiyama, Alabama, take away me-ya-ma
That's okay,
Just send me to good ol' Paducah,
Not so far away!

I was bound determined to learn to improvise that kind of nonsense-yet-real-words solo (as well as learning to make instrument sounds with my voice like the Mills Brothers, with a few friends, and put together a vocal ensemble that could perform with Minneapolis bands like the Southside Aces!). My boyfriend told me that what these singers were doing was called "vocalese," and that that's what I'd need to look into if I wanted more material to learn from.

Then again, there's the stuff that's more what John defined as "vocalese"--the whole sensical sentences put to jazzy sounds--and I'm not too crazy about that.

There's one song out of that whole type of vocalese I like (Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross's "Caravan." I would only spin it at a dance as a novelty song, though! But boy, do I love listening to it at home).

I listened to about 5 albums of the type this thread was started to discuss and hated--I threw out--all but one track of it. I felt about it exactly how Paul said: un-hip (thus uninspiring as dance music) and overly strained to make things fit (which I think might be what he's getting at with "pretentious").

So do I like vocalese or not? I mean, is what I like actually vocalese?

CafeSavoy · #5 Post by **CafeSavoy** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 11:05 am

kitkat wrote:So do I like vocalese or not? I mean, is what I like actually vocalese?

My understanding is that vocalese is putting vocals to instrumental solos in such a way that the sung notes exactly match the instrumental notes. For example, Eddie Jefferson's version of "Body and Soul" where he sings Coleman Hawkins famous solo note for note. Similarly with his "Disappointed" which is a vocal version of Charlie Parker's solo on "Lady Be Good" during the J.A.T.P .jam session with Lester Young.

#6 Post by **JesseMiner** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 11:30 am

CafeSavoy wrote:
kitkat wrote:So do I like vocalese or not? I mean, is what I like actually vocalese?
My understanding is that vocalese is putting vocals to instrumental solos in such a way that the sung notes exactly match the instrumental notes. For example, Eddie Jefferson's version of "Body and Soul" where he sings Coleman Hawkins famous solo note for note. Similarly with his "Disappointed" which is a vocal version of Charlie Parker's solo on "Lady Be Good" during the J.A.T.P .jam session with Lester Young.

And a great example that we can relate to as swing DJs:

Lambert, Hendricks and Ross - Sing a Song of Basie

We are familiar with so many of these swinging Basie tunes. Listen to how close the singers stick to Basie's arrangements. Really interesting. I was actually turned onto the group after reading about them in Norma Miller's book.

I would not consider what either The Mills Brothers or Slim and Slam do as vocalese, but I love what they do none the less!

Jesse

kitkat · #7 Post by **kitkat** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 2:37 pm

Okay. Thanks, Rayned & Jesse.

Hmm. I wonder if there is a distinct word or phrase for "scat that uses words, not simple onomatopoeia, and is often very interspersed with hits from other parts of the band or other vocalists" as heard in Put It Away (quoted above).

Eyeball · #8 Post by **Eyeball** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 2:56 pm

http://www.tuxjunction.net/56kjukepages/bvocalese.html

This web site has some actual vocalese on it, along with recordings of songs that had lyrics pretty much to begin with, but which few people sang b/c they stunk.

String of Pearls is not really a vocalese performance. As someone once said, the lyrics to song like In the Mood, String of Pearls, Tuxedo Junction and so many others were written so that girls would have something to sing.

I was playing "Jersey Bounce" on my keyboard the other night and I thought it would be a neat tune to put a lyric to. Wondered why no one ever had. Turns out, they did...when the tune came out. It's not very good lyric.

The *real' vocalese is lyrics set to Jazz solos or Jazz tunes (leeway, please) that never had a lyric and is simply too complicated for most people to perform sing.

FOUR BROTHERS is a tough one. Fast tune with a lots of vocalese lyrics added.

OTOH, someone pulled out a theme from "Summer Sequence", changed the melody very slightly, added a lyric and came up with "Early Autumn". Beautiful melody, beautiful lyric. Is it vocalese? I don't think so.

There has got to be a really succinct definition of the style already written down for ages.

I used to play that King Pleasure LP all he time at work and one of the rock and roll guys there hated it with a passion, until, for some reason, my telling him that the whole concept was a lyric set to a Jazz solo. This seemed to matter to him and he grew to like or at least tolerate my endless playing of it.

And...finally...for now.....my last KP/Moody' story is - I was in an elevator one time and a black dude got on. Guy was in his 40s or something and I wanted to test his 'hipness' I began to sing the tune out loud under my breath and damned if the guy not only knew it, but began singing along! We sang it till the next floor and were as cool as could be!

kitkat · #9 Post by **kitkat** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 2:59 pm

Eyeball wrote:As someone once said, the lyrics to song like In the Mood, String of Pearls, Tuxedo Junction and so many others were written so that girls would have something to sing.

ROTFL

My grandma tried to teach me the lyrics to this many times as a kid! And then I got to looking it up to learn to play her on the piano and couldn't find many recordings with lyrics...got into swing dancing and couldn't find many recordings with lyrics...

This fits my story to a T. (Grandpa also considered the song his favorite but never sang it.)

Eyeball · #10 Post by **Eyeball** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 3:11 pm

One forgotten aspect of America's pop music were the 'song sheet's' that used to come out evry week or so for a low price that you could buy at the newsstand. Thy had the words to all the pop songs of the moment, with lots of photos and illustrations. No music was printed, in them, just the words....so that girls could have something to sing.

OTOH - another style of vocalese which may not have a title or name -

My friend Leo, now in his 80s, was a real Swing big band fan back in the 30s and 40s in Brooklyn. He hung out with like minded guys and they knew all the big Swing records so well, that they would stand around and the guys would sing the parts of the various sections and solos wordlessly. That must have been very interesting to hear! Vocals w/o words.

Eyeball · #11 Post by **Eyeball** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 3:13 pm

kitkat wrote:
Eyeball wrote:As someone once said, the lyrics to song like In the Mood, String of Pearls, Tuxedo Junction and so many others were written so that girls would have something to sing.
ROTFL

My grandma tried to teach me the lyrics to this many times as a kid! And then I got to looking it up to learn to play her on the piano and couldn't find many recordings with lyrics...got into swing dancing and couldn't find many recordings with lyrics...

This fits my story to a T. (Grandpa also considered the song his favorite but never sang it.)

It is really better NOT to know these lyrics b/c once you know them, they may leap out at you when you least want them to. Add "PE-6-5000" to the stiff list. So lame.

kitkat · #12 Post by **kitkat** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 3:29 pm

Eyeball wrote:That must have been very interesting to hear! Vocals w/o words.

Probably sounded kind of like some of the Mills Brothers' work (the stuff accompanied only by a guitar) if they tried to imitate the sounds of the instruments while they did it.

Eyeball · #13 Post by **Eyeball** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 3:37 pm

kitkat wrote:
Eyeball wrote:That must have been very interesting to hear! Vocals w/o words.
Probably sounded kind of like some of the Mills Brothers' work (the stuff accompanied only by a guitar) if they tried to imitate the sounds of the instruments while they did it.

Hmmmmmm....I dunno....I never asked if they tried to imitate the instruments or if they just 'da da da''d it.

I will call him in the next day or so and ask!

Albert System · #14 Post by **Albert System** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 8:07 am

My parents had a Mills Brothers LP when I was a kid- I literally wore it out! I love them to this day!

But they are certainly NOT vocalese. They did imitate horns and solos and scat. But in the old style way.

Vocalese as I understand it specifically refers to singers or groups setting words to famous be-bop solos like those by Charlie Parker.

That's what I cannot stand. I just think it sounds so contrived and awful.... ugh.

julius · #15 Post by **julius** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 4:03 pm

I actually love a lot of L, H, and R, but I also happen to agree with Paul that the arrangements tend to be kind of stiff. The problem is that they are recreating someone else's music almost note for note, which leaves little room for rhythm and timing of their own. It has to be really tight, otherwise you get a terribly sloppy feel.

Unfortunately the really tight vocalese sound (timing wise) makes it sound horribly square. I think it's a case of "tain't what you do, it's the way that you do it" with most (all?) vocalese.

Two LHR tracks really blow me away every time I hear them: Cloudburst and Everybody's Boppin'. The latter isn't so hot for dancing but the energy on the track is INSANE.