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About Ward Swingle

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Musician

Ward Swingle was the product of an unusually liberal musical education. In his hometown, Mobile, Alabama, he grew up with the sound of jazz and played in one of the great Big Bands before finishing High School. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Cincinnati Conservatory and studied piano with the celebrated Walter Gieseking in postwar France. In Paris in the sixties he was a founding member of the fabled Double Six of Paris, then took the scat singing idea and applied it to the works of Bach, hence The Swingle Singers, whose early recordings won five Grammies. When the Paris group disbanded in 1973, Ward Swingle moved to London and formed an English group, expanding the repertoire to include classical and avant-garde works along with the scat and jazz vocal arrangements

News: Obituary

Ward Swingle, 1927-2015

January 23, 2015

Ward Swingle, who founded a vocal group that melded J.S. Bach with bebop rhythm and scat singing, died on Monday in Eastbourne, England. He was 87. The announcement came from the Swingles, successor to the Swingle Singers, many of whose albums were best sellers in the US and Europe in the 1960s. Born in Alabama, Mr. ...