In the mid-1960s, Al Jarreau was a vocational rehabilitation counselor in San Francisco with a master’s degree. Decades later he had won major awards across jazz, pop and R&B and was known as the Acrobat of Scat. This episode follows him from a Seventh-day Adventist household in Milwaukee, where his father was a minister and his mother a church pianist, through student council president, Ripon College, the University of Iowa, and moonlighting with a trio led by a young George Duke.

The conversation covers his duo with guitarist Julio Martinez at Gatsby’s in Sausalito, the move to Los Angeles, performing between comedy sets by John Belushi and Bette Midler at the Improv, and the percussive vocal techniques that grew from that crucible. It then traces his 1975 Warner Bros. debut We Got By at age 35, the first season of Saturday Night Live, the two-year chart run of Breaking Away, simultaneous jazz, R&B and pop chart success, the Moonlighting theme, We Are the World, Broadway’s Grease, and his death two days after announcing his retirement from touring.

• Why counseling by day was cross-training for reading a room by night
• How a hostile comedy club audience forged the human drum kit
• Scat modernized: micro breaths, tongue clicks and hummed bass lines
• Hacking the rigidly segregated radio formats of the early 1980s
• Family as collaborators: Susan and Ryan Jarreau on vocals and album covers