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 ...