The+Jazz+Fly.

The Jazz Fly Written and Performed by: Matthew Gollub Illustrated by: Karen Hanke

This is a fantastic book for looking at scat as language. When reading through this book, I had to stop to look at the passages of "scat" because it's such a foreign looking thing to me. This book really drives home the idea that scatting is a language all it's own. However, it also drives home the point that anyone can scat, anything can be scat, and anyone can understand scat given context. This book tells the story of a fly who is trying to find his way to town, and asks a bunch of animals to help him find the way but they don't understand him and he doesn't understand them. When he finally reaches town, the Queen Bee is unimpressed with his bands style and asks for something different, so the fly scats all of the different sounds he heard the other animals make and it is a huge success! I would use this book in my lesson plan as a transition from looking at broken English words as scat syllables to experimenting with actual scat syllables, the gibberish used in the style. I think it is a great tool for this because when it gives examples of scat to represent each of the instruments, the syllables are very characteristic of those instruments and we could as a class discuss why that is and how to incorporate that into our own scatting. I think it would make a very smooth transition into using scat syllables and would very effectively allow the students to understand how they function.

Back to Home.