“Listening to Shooby Taylor sing is a shortcut to joy.”
What music lover can resist such a statement?
I certainly couldn’t, and it got me hooked on a BBC radio programme which
investigated the life and work of “the weirdest scat singer of all time” or, as
Shooby styled himself, “the human horn”.
I had never heard of Shooby Taylor before the
programme, but as soon as they played a recording of his extraordinary singing
I realised that I had heard it before and, at the time, dismissed it out of
hand as somebody abusing music, his voice, or merely playing the fool at music’s
expense. Was he taking the mickey (as we
once said)?
To begin with, on hearing the programme I remained not
just sceptical, but appalled. It then
crossed my mind that the whole thing was a spoof, and nobody in their right
mind would make such an extraordinary noise, show such apparent unmusicality or
deface standard works of music in all genres so grotesquely. But then I began to hear things
differently. Here was obviously an
extraordinary talent, albeit being used in a silly way, which was clearly not
someone just having a joke or pretending to be something or somebody they were
not.
Ever since Cleo Laine came to our school in the 1970s and
performed to us, I have been a huge admirer of scat singing – that method of
improvised singing based on an established melody, that uses non-verbal sounds
to propel the voice across a wide range of often incredibly athletic rhythmic
and pitch patterns. When Trinity College
London included improvisation as an option in their graded music exams, I
foolishly thought I was in for a feast of scat singing from vocal candidates
taking what was, as I saw it, the easy alternative to sight reading (which no
student singer in the history of music has ever been able to do). After all, my thinking went, whenever I have
worked with singers (and I did spend some time as an operatic repeteteur) they
seem to have been more able to improvise freely around what was written than to
sing the actual music on the paper. Yet
virtually no singers ever did the improvisation, and those that did nearly all
found it impossible to move in any way beyond the basic stimulus given to them
in the examination. Even jazz candidates
never even attempted a bit of scat.
The reason for this is that scat singing is extraordinarily
difficult, and listening to Shooby Taylor, you realised just how difficult it is. For a start, there were the vocal
sounds. As one commentator observed,
when you listen to him sing, you wonder whether he would soon run out of
consonants. He seemed to have an infinite
array of non-verbal syllables at his disposal, all with the obligatory
consonant to kick them along rhythmically, and he would let these flow from his
mouth without a moment’s hesitation; something made all the more remarkable
since, as the programme later revealed, he suffered from a bad stammer when
speaking. Then there was the range of
pitches, which often traversed any recognisable vocal range without any obvious
switching from a normal voice to falsetto.
And finally there was the amazing ability to think musically on his feet
as he ran off with a melodic improvisation prompted by, quite often, a very well-known
song.
It was this last thing that initially so disturbed me
and others. Taylor’s trademark style was
to superimpose his scat improvisations on pre-existing recordings, and famous
songs by, among others, Elvis Presley and Johnny Mathis rather suffered from
this treatment. It really did sound as
if he was deliberately distorting them to turn classics into something horribly
grotesque. But his musical fodder was
wide-ranging, and I found his superimposed scat singing over Mozart and
Mendelssohn far more effective. Best of
all was his free-ranging performances accompanied merely by an electric organ,
where, rather than base his improvisation on a set melody or harmonic
progression, he merely let fly in the hope that the unnamed keyboard player would
keep along as best as possible. There
were bad accidents and nasty clashes, but in the main, the sheer brilliance of
his fluent and gloriously confident improvisations sailed over such disasters.
I do find myself torn between admiring his skill and
laughing at his outrageous vocal contortions.
Yet, as the BBC programme pointed out, that is all part of the joy. It really is impossible to hear Shooby Taylor
without smiling – although whether that smile is satisfied or ironic is open to
debate. But in a world where we either
take music far too seriously and treat it as some kind of museum piece to be
preserved in aspic, or disregard it as merely the peripheral fabric to our
daily lives, to find a performer who grabs our attention by simply using an
outrageous talent to create outrageous musical distortions is a real joy.
