Swing, Swung, Swingled

Bach swings. So well, in fact, that jazzmen have been spinning out variations on his music ever since the 1930s, when Benny Goodman's band started belting such numbers as Bach Goes to Town, and since then Bach has been through more modern translations than the Iliad. Now from Paris comes an eight-voice chorus called the Swingle Singers, with a new gimmick -- sing-swinging Bach.

Organized just two years ago, the octet (four men, four women) sings fugues and preludes by vocally approximating the sounds of chamber-music instruments. Put to the swinging four-beat rhythm of string bass and drums, the sound is surprisingly engaging, with a distinctly joyous air about it. Their two albums, Bach's Greatest Hits and Going Baroque, have sold more than 250,000 copies and won for them this year's Grammy Award as the best new recording artists of the year. Last May they were imported for a presidential concert at the White House.

"Oodla-Oodlee." Far from paling at the effrontery of it all, most Bach men like the gently swinging translation. And some, like Pianist Glenn Gould, are downright ecstatic: "They're just fabulously good! When I first heard them, I felt like lying on the floor and kicking my heels, that's how good I thought they were."

The Swingle Singers' musical idiom is onomatopoeia, otherwise known in the trade as scat. Scat is like baby talk with a beat and is as old as singing in the shower. Rendered by a jazz stylist like Ella Fitzgerald, who reels off such breathless improvisations in Flying Home as "oodla-oodlee-ooblee-day-lay do-dee-a-din-doi-oodlay-a-din-doi-danzoit-boy-hem," scat can be a highly refined art.

The Swingle Singers, however, sing it straight in the most elementary scat dialect--mainly "da-ba, da-ba" and "doo-boo, doo-boo," with an occasional "papa-da, chin-chin" or "waap" tossed in for special accents. While the revved-up tempo calls for a certain amount of vocal gymnastics, they stick faithfully to the score and never improvise. In fact, their allegiance is much more to Bach than it is to jazz. Their approach is restrained, respectful, and marked by finely honed precision and musicianship.

Bach Outswung. The eight Swingle Singers, currently on their first tour of the U.S., are all classically trained musicians. All are French, except their leader, Ward Swingle, 37, who is a native of Mobile, Ala. A graduate of Cincinnati's College Conservatory of Music, Swingle went to Paris in 1951 on a Fulbright scholarship to study piano, and eventually settled there. To pick up pocket money, he sang the "do-wa" backgrounds for pop singers in various Paris recording studios. As an escape on weekends, he recruited the best singers from the studio vocal groups to have a go at Bach. "We were just trying to improve our musicianship," says Swingle, "but we found that we were all spontaneously swinging the music.

We couldn't help it." Aware that the curiosity factor of their music may wear thin, Swingle is busy varying the group's repertory with Handel, Vivaldi and Mozart. "Mozart took us months to master," says Swingle. "But now we find he swings more easily than Bach. If the interest keeps up, we plan to proceed chronologically from composer to composer. Beethoven may pose some problems, but we hope to give him a try."

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