Style recipe for Suno v5
Vocalese
Vocalese jazz from the 1950s: comping piano, walking bass, brushed swing drums, playful and swaggering in feel. A name-free Suno recipe that reproduces the signature sound without tripping the artist-name filter.
History
Vocalese puts words to jazz solos: a singer takes an instrumentalist's recorded improvisation and sets real lyrics to it. That separates it from scat, which runs on nonsense syllables. The lyrics are almost always syllabic rather than melismatic, one syllable per note, so a fast bebop line turns into a torrent of words. King Pleasure recorded pioneering examples from 1949. The name is a pun on vocalise, with the suffix -ese marking a kind of language, and critic Leonard Feather attributed it to Jon Hendricks when describing Sing a Song of Basie, the first album by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, the trio of Hendricks, Dave Lambert and Annie Ross that became the style's best-known face. Eddie Jefferson, Mark Murphy, Al Jarreau and Kurt Elling are also known for vocalese, and The Manhattan Transfer won a Grammy with Weather Report's Birdland, lyrics by Hendricks. In 1990 Hendricks cut Freddie Freeloader from the Miles Davis tune with Jarreau, George Benson and Bobby McFerrin. Earlier, in 1979, Joni Mitchell had set lyrics to Charles Mingus tunes for her album Mingus.
The recipe
Opening the recipe…
Tag breakdown
Every descriptor in this style, listed one at a time.
| # | Tag |
|---|---|
| 1 | Vocalese jazz |
| 2 | 1950s |
| 3 | playful |
| 4 | swaggering |
| 5 | triumphant |
| 6 | comping piano |
| 7 | walking bass |
| 8 | brushed swing drums |
| 9 | horn section backing |
| 10 | muted trumpet |
| 11 | tenor sax obbligato |
| 12 | guitar chord comping |
| 13 | solos sung verbatim |
| 14 | unison then harmony |
| 15 | mixed male–female lead vocal |
| 16 | bright and agile |
| 17 | wide leaping range |
| 18 | hip lyric narrator |
| 19 | lyricized solo lines |
| 20 | rapid fire diction |
| 21 | three part harmony |
| 22 | layered vocal stack |
| 23 | warm room |
| 24 | analog tape |
| 25 | voices front centre |
| 26 | voices as horns |
| 27 | close harmony stack |
| 28 | medium studio room |
| 29 | short plate tail |
| 30 | brisk medium swing |
| 31 | bass walking steady |
| 32 | unison head opening |
| 33 | breathless middle chorus |
| 34 | held final chord |
| 35 | polished professional master |
| 36 | wide dimensional stereo |
| 37 | 160 BPM |
| 38 | for clubs |
Every descriptor here adds up to 38 tags and 698 characters from the 1950s, clocking in at 120–200 BPM.