Each April, Jazz Appreciation Month gives South Alabama a reason to look back at the musicians the region produced who went on to shape jazz far beyond the Port City. Few did it more distinctively than Ward Swingle, a Mobile-born pianist, vocalist and arranger whose Paris-based vocal ensemble, the Swingle Singers, became one of the most honored groups in jazz and choral music.
A Mobile upbringing, a national education
Swingle was born in Mobile on September 21, 1927, and showed musical talent early, learning clarinet, oboe and piano as a child. Before finishing high school, he was already playing in local big bands around the Mobile area, the kind of dance-hall and swing outfits that gave a generation of Gulf Coast musicians their start. He went on to study at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, graduating summa cum laude in 1950.
A Fulbright scholarship took him to France in 1951, where he studied piano under the noted German pianist Walter Gieseking and worked as a rehearsal pianist for Les Ballets de Paris. He spent the 1950s establishing himself in the Paris music scene, including as a founding member of the vocal jazz group Les Double Six.
Founding the Swingle Singers
In 1962, Swingle formed his own ensemble in Paris, applying scat-singing techniques to the works of Bach and other classical composers. The approach, wordless vocal harmonies layered over swinging jazz rhythm, was unlike anything else on record at the time. The group’s early albums won five Grammy Awards and introduced millions of listeners to a genre-blurring style that borrowed equally from the concert hall and the jazz club.
Swingle disbanded the original Paris lineup in 1973 and started a second iteration of the group, known as Swingle II, in London, broadening the repertoire into contemporary and avant-garde material. He returned to the United States in 1984, where he continued composing, arranging and conducting choirs, and published his vocal arrangements through his own company, Swingle Music.
Recognition and legacy
In 2004, the French government named Swingle an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in recognition of his contribution to French musical culture, a notable honor for a musician who got his start playing in Mobile’s big bands decades earlier. He died in January 2015 in England, survived by his wife, three children and three grandchildren.
Swingle’s career is a reminder of how far the region’s musical talent has traveled. As Jazz Appreciation Month continues, his story remains one of Mobile’s clearest connections to the international jazz world, a local kid on piano and clarinet who ended up rewriting how audiences heard both jazz and classical music.