Safa Sou-RAY!
At first it sounds like Kim Cattrall is having a stroke as her then-husband, Mark Levinson, dutifully plays the upright bass. “Yama kippi yay bo / Sedda rayfa kayba / in dog Latin he quoth / You jay Safa Sou-RAY!” Cattrall says in bursts and fits like she’s performing at a poetry slam.
Despite many of the 600-plus comments on the original viral clip “Kim Cattrall talks about hubby Mark” pointing to a disturbing medical episode or an attempt at speaking Simlish, the former Sex and the City star is scatting. The clip was resurfaced by Gawker in 2015 and later cemented in the cultural canon by Saturday Night Live’s Cecily Strong and host Daniel Kaluuya.
The scatting Cattrall enjoys, however, is not of a sexual nature. For her, it’s purely about jazz. “It was actually (filmed) to promote (my ex-husband’s) music and it was a very fun thing we did one afternoon in our little house, our little beach house and it spawned this kind of crazy… fans to watch this video,” she explained to Yahoo.
“I don't know why it so captured people's imaginations,” Cattrall added. “In Brooklyn, in New York they had this opening, some artist made some kind of painting to the music of it and the scatting,” she said, referencing the THNK1994 museum’s scat-inspired 2017 exhibition Yama Kippi Yay Bo. “It was very odd!”
The words that tumble forth from Cattrall’s mouth aren’t entirely improvised either, as much as we’d like to believe she was truly ad libbing over errant bass slaps. Upon closer inspection, it was discovered that the words originate from a Rupert Brooke poem, “The Little Dog’s Day.” The poem goes:
“Jam incipiedo, sedere facebo,”
In dog-Latin he quoth, ‘Euge! sophos! hurray!’
...He fought with the he-dogs, and winked at the she-dogs...
...For the town never knew such a hullabaloo
As that little dog raised—till the end of the day.”
Cattrall is no stranger to a bit of impromptu jazz, having once sang back-up for Lou Reed. Levinson and Cattrall split in 2004, but they still share this fond memory, along with a book they co-authored in 2001 titled Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm, which is still available for purchase.