"Blue Skies"

This piece is a popular jazz standard. Jazz is a musical genre with African-American origins in the late 19th century in New Orleans, Louisiana.  This style of music is distinctive in usually having: swing and blues scales, polyrhythms, having call and response musical lines, and containing improvisational passages.

Improvisation is when a musician is composing (creating music) while performing in the moment, without any preparation.  You can hear Ella Fitzgerald improvising her own musical ideas and using her voice to mimic the sounds of various instruments like the trumpet while doing so.

Vocal improvisation is usually characterized by the jazz technique scat singing, where you improvise your own melody and use wordless vocables, nonesense words (sounds with no word meaning), or without words.

Extension Activity

Having sang this song before in class and improvised as a group together, try improvising your own musical ideas with the Backing Track as a soloist!