Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons: All of Me

I sang very briefly with a jazz quartet in college, and while I love jazz and enjoy the challenge of improvisation, I’ve always been terrified of scat.  When our group decided to jam on “All of Me,” I relied my opera singer skill of memorization to recall the amazing rendition by Sarah Vaughan. I’m embarrassed to say that this was the best jam we ever had, not because I was suddenly brilliant at improv, but because I had memorized and regurgitated Sarah Vaughan’s verbatim! Nonetheless, it’s still one of my all-time favorite songs—and boy can that woman scat!