Ella Fitzgerald has been one of the foremost practitioners of the form of talking shit known as scatting. With the air as her scratch pad, she has scribbled much syllabic salad into song. Once during a concert in Berlin Ella forgot the words to Mack the Knife, but bullskated her way through it with some bodacious makeshift palaver. After her performance she was declared the official voice of the Land of Oooh Blah Deee, traveling air mail special and postmarked “from now on.”

I have an aunt and uncle who love to go at it. Their battles are reminiscent of the “carving contests” that went on between musicians during the early days of jazz in New Orleans. Once when they were on the outs, my uncle refused to engage my aunt in any verbal slugging. She was so angered by her unanswered challenges that she began badmouthing him in some strange talk she called “Tut.” Not knowing what she was saying about him roused my uncle back into combat. Their jam sessions were restored in the best New Orleans tradition, which trumpeter Mutt Carey described as a battle where “if you couldn’t blow a man down with your horn, at least you could use it to hit him alongside his head.”

Once during a show at the Apollo the headliner tried to chump the audience off by playing bad imitations of the imitators of his own work. But a woman in the balcony wasn’t going for it and let him know about it: “All right, now! Let’s have some interpretation!”

This type of ensemble playing rises from the streets of my life like a herd of elephants running off at the mouth. A space opens up where I can take my solo. I open up considering a fish ‘n chips joint across the street. Now, some folks hold to the notion that fish were made for the dish and let the chips fall where they may. But just maybe, as a side-order argument, fish were made to swim free and let the chips fall where they can best get a play. There I go again. More rowdy blank verse. Like all the rest before me I seem to be doomed to dissonance and thoughts like highwater pants that are too far from where they’re supposed to be.