Sarah Vaughan's song "All of Me" is a jazz standard. Photo: William P Gottlieb, Public Domain
Music correspondent Kirsten Zemke digs into scat, the vocal jazz improvisation where a singer uses wordless vocables, nonsense syllables and onomatopoeic sounds to mimic a musical instrument solo.
It was widespread in the 30s and 40s and evolved into further complexity over the decades.
Kirsten Zemke is an ethnomusicologist at the University of Auckland's School of Social Sciences.
