Since the 1930s and ̕40s, jazz has stood tall in American popular music, drawing into its embrace not only great horn players, percussionists, guitarists, bassists, and pianists, but also some of the greatest singers in America’s musical history. Jazz has laid the groundwork for important innovations in modern singing, opening up entirely new ways of delivering songs through what would eventually become jazz standards—songs that formed the basis of the American Songbook. In So You Want to Sing Jazz, singer and professor of voice Jan Shapiro gives a guided tour through the art and science of the jazz vocal style. Throughout, Shapiro hones in on what makes jazz singing distinctive, suggesting along the way how other types of singers can make use of jazz. She looks at such key matters in jazz singing as the role of improvisation, the place of specific singers who influenced and even defined vocal jazz as we know it today, and the unique way in which jazz incorporates vibrato, conversational delivery, rhythmic phrasing, and melodic embellishment and improvisation. The book includes guest-authored chapters by singing voice researchers Dr. Scott McCoy and Dr. Wendy LeBorgne. In So You Want to Sing Jazz, singers and voice teachers finally have the go-to resource they need for singing vocal jazz. The So You Want to Sing seriesis produced in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Like all books in the series, So You Want to Sing Jazz features online supplemental material on the NATS website. Please visit www.nats.org to access style-specific exercises, audio and video files, and additional resources.

This book provides practical advice on professional jazz singing. Topics covered include getting inside the lyrics, personalising the song, creating an emotional mood, word stress, melodic variation, breathing, rhythm, choosing a key, writing a lead sheet, creating an arrangement, organising a gig book, rehearsing, and playing styles.

Explores the evolution of jazz singing with profiles of great performers, discussing how they learned their craft and the experiences that shaped their careers

Voices Found: Free Jazz and Singing contributes to a wave of voice studies scholarship with the first book-length study of free jazz voice. It pieces together a history of free jazz voice that spans from sound poetry and scat in the 1950s to the more recent wave of free jazz choirs. The author traces the developments and offers a theory, derived from interviews with many of the most important singers in the history of free jazz voice, of how listeners have experienced and evaluated the often unconventional vocal sounds these vocalists employed. This theory explains that even audiences willing to enjoy harsh sounds from saxophones or guitars often resist when voices make sounds that audiences understand as not-human. Experimental poetry and scat were combined and transformed in free jazz spaces in the 1960s and 1970s by vocalists like Yoko Ono (in solo work and her work with Ornette Coleman and John Stevens), Jeanne Lee (in her solo work and her work with Archie Shepp and Gunter Hampel), Leon Thomas (in his solo work as well as his work with Pharoah Sanders and Carlos Santana), and Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols (who devoted much of their energy to creating unaccompanied free jazz vocal music). By studying free jazz voice we can learn important lessons about what we expect from the voice and what happens when those expectations are violated. This book doesn't only trace histories of free jazz voice, it makes an attempt to understand why this story hasn't been told before, with an impressive breadth of scope in terms of the artists covered, drawing on research from the US, Canada, Wales, Scotland, France, The Netherlands, and Japan.

Designed for vocal students to better connect what they "hear" with what they "play."

In this toe-tapping jazz tribute, the traditional "This Old Man" gets a swinging makeover, and some of the era's best musicians take center stage. The tuneful text and vibrant illustrations bop, slide, and shimmy across the page as Satchmo plays one, Bojangles plays two . . . right on down the line to Charles Mingus, who plays nine, plucking strings that sound "divine." Easy on the ear and the eye, this playful introduction to nine jazz giants will teach children to count--and will give them every reason to get up and dance! Includes a brief biography of each musician.

Louis Armstrong pioneered the jazz vocal. Based on dozens of interviews, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the diverse performers who inherited Satchmo's legacy and made it their own. They are Ethel Waters, Bing Crosby, Bobby McFerrin, Cab Calloway, Big Joe Turner, Billie Holiday, Nat "King" Cole, Joe Williams, Dinah Washington, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Tony Bennett, and many others.

Tish Oney merges the worlds of jazz and classical singing in a comprehensive guide for those teaching and singing jazz. Legendary jazz singers’ performance strategies are discussed providing unique insights. Jazz Singing combines jazz stylization and improvisational techniques with classic voice pedagogy to outline a method that builds the jazz voice upon a strong foundation of proper alignment, efficient breathing, healthy phonation, a clear understanding of vocal anatomy, and the physics of singing. Various strategies to enhance improvisation and artistry are presented, and mindful coordination of all aspects is emphasized to create authentic, healthy jazz singing in this groundbreaking book.

The author of the magisterial A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers now approaches the great singers and their greatest work in an innovative and revelatory way: through considering their finest albums, which is the format in which this music was most resonantly organized and presented to its public from the 1940s until the very recent decline of the CD. It is through their albums that Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, and the rest of the glorious honor roll of jazz and pop singers have been most tellingly and lastingly appreciated, and the history of the album itself, as Will Friedwald sketches it, can now be seen as a crucial part of musical history. We come to understand that, at their finest, albums have not been mere collections of individual songs strung together arbitrarily but organic phenomena in their own right. A Sinatra album, a Fitzgerald album, was planned and structured to show these artists at their best, at a specific moment in their artistic careers. Yet the albums Friedwald has chosen to anatomize go about their work in a variety of ways. There are studio and solo albums: Lee’s Black Coffee, June Christy’s Something Cool, Cassandra Wilson’s Belly of the Sun. There are brilliant collaborations: famous ones—Tony Bennett and Bill Evans, Louis Armstrong and Oscar Peterson—and wonderful surprises like Doris Day and Robert Goulet singing Annie Get Your Gun. There are theme albums—Dinah Washington singing Fats Waller, Maxine Sullivan singing Andy Razaf, Margaret Whiting singing Jerome Kern, Barb Jungr singing Bob Dylan, and the sublime Jo Stafford singing American and Scottish folk songs. There are also stunning concert albums like Ella in Berlin, Sarah in Japan, Lena at the Waldorf, and, of course, Judy at Carnegie Hall. All the greats are on hand, from Kay Starr and Carmen McRae to Jimmy Scott and Della Reese (Della Della Cha Cha Cha). And, from out of left field, the astounding God Bless Tiny Tim. Each of the fifty-seven albums discussed here captures the artist at a high point, if not at the expected moment, of her or his career. The individual cuts are evaluated, the sequencing explicated, the songs and songwriters heralded; anecdotes abound of how songs were born and how artists and producers collaborated. And in appraising each album, Friedwald balances his own opinions with those of musicians, listeners, and critics. A monumental achievement, The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums is an essential book for lovers of American jazz and popular music.