Most of the 20th century's singers performed in the jazz idiom, though not all rank in the style known as vocal jazz. While jazz singers from Russ Columbo to Doris Day to Johnny Mathis relied on talent and vocal strength alone to carry material, jazz singers instead chose to interpret standards in much the same way as the great jazz instrumentalists: their readings of the great American songbook required talents related to improvisation, musicianship, harmony, even personalizing a song to bring a new meaning to the lyric.

A pair of early giants, Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby, recorded distinctive readings of standards, often looking inward to distinguish jazz singing from the more simplistic reading of a pop song. From the big-band era came dozens of major jazz singers, most of the best in fact. Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Tormé, Anita O'Day, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Joe Williams; all of them worked long hours touring with swing bands, and most of these jazz singers were repaid in kind with major success during the post-war era, when this style really bloomed.

Though it wasn't always easy separating jazz singers from traditional pop, those in the jazz repertoire usually earned the tag by delivering variations of their material in performance or scatting wordlessly in emulation of a jazz soloist. They also generally refused no-name orchestras and generic pop hits of the day, preferring instead the work of talented arrangers (Nelson Riddle, Billy May) and truly great composers (Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, the Gershwins).

Just as jazz vocalists of the '40s and '50s stretched the concept of swing, post-bop singers interpreted the frantic tempoes and exploratory solos of jazz instrumentalists with their own experiments. Lambert, Hendricks & Ross indulged in manic harmonies, while a host of vocalists (including Betty Carter, Mark Murphy, and Abbey Lincoln) explored radical charts and improvisation. Even while the ranks of jazz vocalists thinned during the 1970s and '80s, many jazz artists continued in the style. In the late 90's into the 2000's we find such artists as Diana Krall, Norah Jones, Cassandra Wilson, and Karrin Allyson, just to name a few, carrying the torch into the new century.

History of  jazz continued