Jimmy Scott
A curse of nature made Jimmy Scott the eternal jazz curio – and genius.
Kallmann’s 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-inches to five-six, he wondered how he’d sound with a lower voice. Meanwhile he forged an agonizingly slow delivery – behind the beat, punctuated with clipped syllables, long wails – taking you to the edge of the emotional cliff and leaves you hanging.
Scott’s career was in the balance – “perhaps the most unjustly ignored American singer of the 20th century” (according to Joseph Hooper in the New York Times) – when he was re-discovered 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 seeing Hamlet or Macbeth all rolled up into a song,” said Lou Reed. The little man with the strange voice didn’t look out of place when David Lynch had him sing in the last episode of Twin Peaks.
At 76, his life can be viewed as Lynchian noir. His mother had ten kids before she was hit by a car saving one of them, when Jimmy was 13. 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 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 signed, forced it 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 and deliveries 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, boss of 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 renditions of eight standards, with tasty small combos drenched with Johnny Mandel’s lush strings. A one of a kind album with a voice that showed age and powerful resilience, hanging you out to dry.
“We’re alive and kicking, that’s the important thing.” Jimmy Scott’s voice is a morning coughing rasp over heavy long-distance static from a Culver City, Ca., hotel and TV in the background. Now he performs 30, 40 weeks a year. “It would be nice to be able to sit back, but you gotta do what you gotta do. 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 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.”
Mention Lounge Nation and Jimmy Scott hisses softly: “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 what-not, but we grow up like everybody else. We look for something different and realize we have to grow with what an artist is saying to understand what value we can get out of it. It’s just a time thing, baby.”