A term for the practice of jazz singing in which texts (newly invented) are set to recorded jazz improvisations. The word is a pun on the term ‘vocalise’, combining the ideas of a jazz ‘vocal’ and a private language (indicated by the suffix ‘-ese’). Eddie Jefferson performed vocalese from the 1940s, but the best-known early recordings were made by King Pleasure, including his version of Jefferson’s Moody’s Mood for Love (1952, Prst.), based on a saxophone solo by James Moody, and his own setting of Parker’s Mood (1953, Prst.), using Charlie Parker’s blues improvisation of that title. Other important practitioners of vocalese were Dave Lambert, Annie Ross and, above all, Jon Hendricks, who was extremely inventive in creating texts to capture the feeling of the original solos. In 1957 Lambert, Hendricks and Ross (later Yolande Bavan) formed a vocal trio which attained some commercial success with their vocalese; it disbanded in 1964, but Hendricks continued to create and perform such pieces into the 1980s with a group comprising members of his family. Although the singing of vocalese is most closely associated with the bop style, it was also practised later by such popular singers as the Pointer Sisters and, notably, Joni Mitchell in her version of Charles Mingus’s Goodbye Pork Pie Hat (on the album Mingus, 1979); in 1985 the vocal quartet Manhattan Transfer recorded the album Vocalese (Atl.). See also L. Feather: ‘An Explanation of Vocalese’, Jazz: a Quarterly of American Music, no.3 (1959), 261–7.
J. BRADFORD ROBINSON/R