CODA 2: Jimmy Scott (June 30, 2001)
A curse of nature made Jimmy Scott the eternal jazz curio – and genius. Kallman syndrome, a rare hereditary disorder that arrests adolescence, gave him an alto voice close to a woman's. His high cheekbones and hairless face had some believing he was a woman in drag. He carried a gun to get paid and fend off homosexual advances. Even into his 30s, when he sprouted from 4-foot-11 to 5-foot-6, he wondered how he'd sound with a lower voice.
Meanwhile he managed to forge an agonizingly slow delivery – behind the beat, punctuated by clipped syllables, long wails – tasking you to the very edge of the emotional cliff and leaving you hanging.
Scott's career was in limbo – "perhaps the mostv unjustly ignored American singer of the 20xth century," according to Joseph Hooper in the New York Times – when he was rediscoveredd by Lounge Nation, that curious campy Gen-X retro movement.
"Jimmy Scott is the only singer who makes me cry," announced Madonna, who put him in a video. "It's like Hamlet or Macbeth all rolled up into a song," said Lou Reed. Ethan Hawke put him in a movie singing John Lennon's Jealous Guy, after having Yoko Ono waive the hefty royalty fee ("John loved Little Jimmy so much"), and notes: "My thing is not about Jimmy Scott being weird. It's about Jimmy Scott being cool." The little man with the strange voice hardly looked out of place when David Lynch had him sing the spooky Sycamore Trees in the last episode of Twin Peaks.
At 76, his life can be viewed as Lynchian noir. His mother had 10 kids before she was hit by a car saving one of them, when Jimmy was 13. (Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child). He managed a work permit at 16 to escape a litany of foster homes. He had a hit, Everybody's Somebody's Fool, under Lionel Hampton's name, which didn't do him much good when he went solo. He bounced around. He thought his big break had arrived in 1962 when Ray Charles produced and played piano on his Falling In Love Is Wonderful album. But the small Savoy label, to which Scott was still signed, forced the lavish production out of circulation. (The album, still in limbo, fetches thousands on the collectibles circuit.) He fell in and out of love, he drank. He worked in the shipping department of Cleveland's Sheraton Hotel, and cared for his ailing, estranged father.
In 1991 Scott sang at the funeral of songwriter friend Doc Pomus. Seymour Stein, bossman at post-punk Sire Records, heard him, cried, and sent a contract by courier the next day. "It was like Doc's hand come out of the grave," said Scott.
The result was the 1992 comeback album All the Way, over the top oh-so slow renditions of eight standards, with tasty small combo backing drenched with Johnny Mandel's lushly romantic strings. An incredible album, one of a kind. with a voice that showed its age and its power and resilience, he wrung every ounce of emotion from the songs.
"We're alive and kicking, that's the important thing." Little Jimmy Scott's voice is a morning coughing rasp over heavy long-distance static from a Culver City hotel. Now he performs 30, 40 weeks a year, as if making up for lost time. "It would be nice to be able to sit back, but you gotta do what you gotta do, baby. Tiring? Well, I came into the business traveling on the road. It's part of what you have to do, so you bring yourself to do it."
Should fame have come earlier? "Kickin' about it ain't gonna do nothin' but hurt your foot. It's not so much rewarding financially for the necessities that you need. But it's a joyous thing to know that if the art is presented in the right way and the public sees that.
What makes a great singer, he rasps, is "exploring the essence of the song in its place in time, traveling through its lifetime. I love songs where you can recognize the story, or some feeling like 'That might've been my life,' and not just a singer's imagination. Songs as a living entity, reaching out to people." That's why he named his new album Over the Rainbow, in memory of first hearing Judy Garland sing it after his mother died, and it "spoke to my soul." His rendering of Don't Take Your Love From Me recalls one of the first tunes he sang with cool swing saxophonist Lester Young in the mid-1940s, "such a comfortable thing" to have behind you.
„What makes a great singer, he says, is how they "relay" a song. "It should mean something to you. It should embrace something in your make-up. I don't care if it's rock or ballads or whatever. Music has such power and creates so many moods of expression. A lot of it can be, we look at it as, 'Oh, this is a guy's imagination.' But that's something that could be lifelike – the story he's telling, the song he's relating, the thought he's given it."]
He still loves re-telling the story of the great bassist Charles Mingus walking out in frustration over accompanying Scott: "If anybody who could play the rhythm of a song and get it right it was Mingus. Now, I sing with delayed stops and behind the beat. When they hired him, he thought he was backing a singer who sang on the beat. He was always a little jumpy, and he said, 'C'mon you can do it' to me. But then he walked out and we had to tell him, of all people, 'C'mon you can do it.' We laughed about it for many years afterwards."
Mention Lounge Nation and Jimmy Scott – the man who now models cashmere sweaters for Milan designer Saverio Palatella – hisses softly: "Uh-huh. Well, I guess it's an experience for them. Everything was out for a trend, and then the fashion passed. There was a time when we had the boogie-woogie, the Lindy-hop, and excitement and whatnot, but we grow up like everybody else. And they [Gex-X] look for something different and they begin to realize they have to grow with it to understand it. As we grow up we begin to realize what value we can get out of it. It's just a time thing, baby."