You’ve heard it. That moment in "Mack the Knife" where Ella completely forgets the lyrics in front of a live Berlin audience and just... keeps going. Most singers would have crumbled into a ball of stage fright. Ella Fitzgerald didn’t. She started singing about how she didn't know the words and proceeded to invent a masterpiece on the fly. That’s the dream, right? Learning how to improvise a la Ella Fitzgerald isn't just about making funny noises with your mouth. It’s about a specific kind of musical bravery that feels almost impossible to replicate until you break it down into the actual mechanics of what she was doing.
She wasn't just "winging it." That’s the first big lie people believe about scat singing. Scatting is often treated like a musical accident, but for Ella, it was architectural. She was an instrument. Specifically, she was a horn player trapped in the body of a vocalist. If you want to tap into that energy, you have to stop thinking like a singer who needs words and start thinking like a bebop saxophonist who just happens to have vocal cords.
The Horn Player’s Mindset: Why Ella Sounded Different
Ella grew up in the era of big bands. She wasn't just listening to other singers; she was obsessed with the phrasing of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. This is the "secret sauce." When you try to improvise a la Ella Fitzgerald, you have to ditch the "la la la" stuff. That’s amateur hour. Ella used "bop" syllables—hard consonants followed by short, percussive vowels. Think dood-it, bap, shoo-bee-doo-bee.
Why does this matter? Because of the "attack."
A trumpet has a sharp attack. A piano has a sharp attack. Most singers have a "soft" attack where they slide into notes. Ella hit her notes with the precision of a percussionist. Listen to her 1960 recording in Berlin. When she goes into her scat solo, her tongue is doing the work of a drummer’s sticks. She’s hitting Ts and Ds and Bs to create a rhythmic pocket that is so deep you could fall into it.
Honestly, the easiest way to start is to pick one rhythm. Just one. Don't worry about the notes yet. Take a simple four-beat measure and try to fill it with "Da-ba-da-ba-doot." Repeat it until it feels like a physical reflex. Ella’s genius was her ability to take a tiny rhythmic fragment and pull it like taffy until it became a whole new melody.
The "Quote" Method: Musical Inside Jokes
One thing Ella did better than anyone was the "musical quote." If she was improvising over a standard, she might suddenly drop in four bars of "The Wedding March" or a nursery rhyme. It was funny. It was clever. But more importantly, it showed she knew exactly where she was in the song's harmonic structure.
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To improvise a la Ella Fitzgerald, you need to have a mental library of melodies. She wasn't just pulling notes out of thin air; she was rearranging the DNA of jazz history. If you're singing a song in B-flat, you need to know other songs in B-flat so you can "borrow" their parts. It’s like musical sampling before hip-hop existed.
People think scatting is about being "random." It’s the opposite. It’s about being incredibly specific. Ella knew the "changes"—the chord progressions—better than most of the guys in the band. If the chord changed from a G7 to a Cmaj7, she was already there, landing on the third or the seventh of the chord to make it sound "right" to our ears. You can’t fake that. You have to learn your scales, specifically the pentatonic and the blues scales, but you have to learn them so well that you forget you’re singing them.
Vocabulary is Everything
You wouldn’t try to write a novel if you only knew ten words. Scatting is the same. You need a vocabulary of "licks."
- The Fall: Ella would often hit a high note and then let it "fall" off, like a slide trombone.
- The Growl: Occasionally, she’d add a bit of grit, a Louis Armstrong-esque rasp, just for a second.
- The Shake: A fast vibrato at the end of a phrase that sounds like a trumpet player shaking their horn.
If you look at transcriptions of her solos—and yes, people actually write these out like classical music—you see patterns. She loved the interval of a perfect fourth. She loved chromatic runs (going up or down by half-steps). These aren't random choices. They are deliberate stylistic hallmarks.
Getting Over the "I Sound Silly" Phase
Let’s be real. The first time you try to scat, you’re going to feel like an idiot. You’re making nonsense sounds in your living room and wondering if the neighbors think you’ve lost it. That’s the barrier. Most people stop there.
Ella had this incredible sense of joy. You can hear it in her voice—she’s smiling while she sings. That joy is actually a technical tool. It relaxes the throat. When you’re tense, your vocal range shrinks and your rhythm gets stiff. When you’re "playing," like a kid in a sandbox, your brain opens up to melodic possibilities you’d never find if you were trying to be "perfect."
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Basically, you have to give yourself permission to sound bad. Ella famously forgot the words to "Mack the Knife," but she didn't apologize. She leaned into the mistake. She turned the mistake into the highlight of the show. That’s the core of jazz. If you hit a "wrong" note, hit it again. Make it look like you meant it. If you do it twice, it’s a stylistic choice.
The Technical Breakdown: Harmony and Ear Training
If you want to actually get good at this, you need to train your ears. Ella had "perfect pitch," or something very close to it. She could hear a complex chord played by a piano and immediately identify every note inside it.
You don't need perfect pitch, but you do need "relative pitch."
- Start with the Roots: Play a chord on a piano or a guitar. Sing the root note. Then sing the third. Then the fifth.
- The "Blue" Note: Find the flattened fifth. In the key of C, that’s a G-flat. That note is the "stink" in the jazz. It’s the note that makes it sound soulful. Ella used that note to create tension before resolving it back to a "safe" note.
- Transcription: This is the hard part. Take a 10-second clip of Ella scatting. Try to sing it back exactly. Not "sorta" like it. Exactly like it. Every breath, every syllable, every pitch. This is how the pros do it. They "eat" the solos of the masters until that language becomes their own.
It's tedious. It's frustrating. But one day, you’ll be singing a shower song and a phrase will pop out of your mouth that sounds like 1950s Harlem. That’s when you know it’s working.
Rhythmic Disruption: The Art of the Syncopation
Ella’s rhythm was "behind the beat."
If the drummer is hitting 1, 2, 3, 4, Ella is hitting just a fraction of a second after the beat. It creates this "swing" feeling. If you sing right on the beat, you sound like a march. If you sing too far ahead, you sound anxious. But if you hang back, you sound like you own the room.
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Try this: Put on a metronome at 90 BPM. Clap on the 2 and the 4. Now, try to sing a simple melody while keeping that clap steady. It’s harder than it looks. Most people naturally want to clap on 1 and 3. In jazz, 2 and 4 are your best friends. Ella’s scatting often played against the 2 and 4, creating cross-rhythms that made her solos feel like they were dancing.
Why Ella Still Matters in a Digital World
In an age of Auto-Tune and perfect digital editing, the raw, human spontaneity of an Ella Fitzgerald improvisation is almost shocking. It reminds us that music is a conversation. When she scatted, she was talking to the bass player. She was talking to the audience. She was even talking to herself.
Learning to improvise a la Ella Fitzgerald isn't about becoming a museum piece. It’s about learning how to be present. You can't scat if you're thinking about your grocery list or your taxes. You have to be right there, in that millisecond, reacting to the sound that just left your throat.
It’s a form of meditation, honestly. A very loud, very rhythmic meditation.
Actionable Steps to Master the Ella Style
If you're ready to actually do this instead of just reading about it, here is the path forward. No fluff, just the work.
- Listen to "How High the Moon" (Live in Berlin, 1960): This is the gold standard. Listen to it once for fun. Listen to it a second time and focus only on her syllables. Listen a third time and focus only on the notes she "quotes" from other songs.
- Build Your Syllable Set: Don't use "la" or "da." Develop a personal kit of sounds. Use Zit, Bop, Doo-dle-at, Shuh, Ga-da-pa. Write them down if you have to. Practice saying them fast, like a tongue twister, without singing.
- The One-Note Solo: Put on a jazz backing track (search YouTube for "Jazz Blues in F backing track"). Spend two minutes improvising using only one note. You have to make it interesting using only rhythm and syllables. This forces you to stop relying on "pretty melodies" and start focusing on the "swing."
- Record and Cringe: Record yourself scatting for 30 seconds. Listen back. It will be painful. You’ll hear where you went off-pitch or where your rhythm got shaky. Fix one thing. Just one. Then record again.
- Learn the "Head": In jazz, the "head" is the main melody of the song. You should never try to improvise until you can sing the main melody perfectly, from memory, in your sleep. Ella always anchored her wildest improvisations in the reality of the original song.
The journey to improvise a la Ella Fitzgerald is long. You’re trying to condense decades of big band experience and instrumental mastery into your vocal practice. But the moment you stop "trying" to be jazz and you just start being the music, you'll feel it. That’s the Ella magic. It’s not about being perfect; it’s about being free.
Start with a single "Doo-bee-doo-ba" and see where it takes you. Just don't forget to swing.