Jimmy Scott. The singer.
by Joe McEwen

This was original published on http://www.caughtbytheriver.net

Jimmy Scott was a singer. Though his musical support was mostly jazz-powered, he was not your typical jazz singer but instead sang ballads and sang them as if the delivery of each syllable was an extraction of precious metal. Scott sang sad songs from the the songbooks favored by Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, two artists who shared his deep, mature and naked emotional investment. On stage, Jimmy Scott bled for his audience and, more likely, himself. Motherless at 13 and afflicted with Kallmann Syndrome (a condition that prevented him from reaching puberty), Scott inhabited an often harrowing, unwelcoming universe. Jimmy Scott always stood on the outside looking in.

My own connection with Jimmy Scott began in college with an album on Atlantic Records called The Source (1969). The Source was produced by Philadelphia jazz DJ turned record man Joel Dorn. It was jazz but it wasn’t quite, featuring stalwarts Jr. Mance, Ron Carter and David Newman as support. The music was otherworldly to a college freshman; a raw, bittersweet emotion that was soul music of the deepest kind but buttressed by a fragrant unit of NYC jazz players. And the voice pouring into each song was hypnotic, the fragile cry of a lonely spirit calling out hauntingly in “On Broadway” and “Our Day Will Come,” among others. It was not quite male, but then not female (although close your eyes and he sounds a little like Nancy Wilson, to me anyway).

Our paths crossed remarkably enough at Sire Records in 1991. Over a period of five years Scott recorded a trilogy of albums for us, All The Way (Tommy LiPuma), Dream (Mitchell Froom) and Heaven (Craig Street), that remain very personal to me. But this not my story. These three projects would certainly not have happened without Seymour Stein and Bill Bentley, and probably not without the death of Jimmy’s friend and champion Doc Pomus, whose funeral service occasioned Scott’s solo delivery of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” a riveting moment that stunned the assembled, including Seymour and myself. The Sire albums, each its own uniquely conceived masterpiece, enabled Jimmy Scott to perform regularly for the rest of his life.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to listen to a Jimmy Scott album all the way through, much as it was seeing him live. One song is often so draining, requiring an undivided emotional investment. I think Jimmy Scott was a genius, a very mortal man who gave everything for the cause. He was born on July 17, 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio and died on June 12, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Jimmy Scott was indeed a singer.

Little Jimmy Scott: “Someone to Watch Over Me”

by Peter Guralnick

The first time I saw Little Jimmy Scott was at a memorial for Big Joe Turner that Doc Pomus had organized in December 1985. I had been hearing about Jimmy from Doc for years – “the best ballad singer I ever heard,” Doc wrote. “He sang behind the beat further than anyone else ever could and every time I thought he was too far back he returned somehow with impeccable meter. He had a sob in his voice that always had me close to tears.” They were tight in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, Doc said, hung out, did gigs together. Not only that, Doc was going with Jimmy’s cousin Aida, who “loved me fiercely and poetically, [but] I was cool with my feelings. That was the style in those days.”

But for all of Doc’s paeans to his singing I never got to see Jimmy in person, and Doc didn’t either, because in the aftermath of a career that never brought much in the way of material rewards, Jimmy had returned to his hometown of Cleveland, where he worked as an elevator operator at the Sheraton downtown, and despite all his efforts Doc was unable to re-establish contact.

Jimmy returned to the New York area in 1985, and Doc reconnected with him in Newark just before the Big Joe Turner Memorial, where he was a late addition to the bill. It was, as Doc might have said, kind of a crazy night, with all kinds of big names filling the club and emotions running wild. Without the benefit of rehearsal, Jimmy’s performance was a little ragged, lacking the kind of broken-hearted, slow-drag assurance that you hear on his classic records, from the earliest sides to the wonderful 1963 album produced by Ray Charles for his own label, Tangerine, that went unreleased for forty years because of a “lifetime” contract with Savoy. It was thrilling to see him, though, thrilling to hear him, and it seemed like things were finally bound to start happening.

They didn’t, though, despite all of the efforts of Doc and other friends of long standing like Joel Dorn. In September 1987 Doc wrote an impassioned plea to the music industry. He ran down a list of all the singers Jimmy had influenced, including Frankie Valli, Nancy Wilson and Stevie Wonder, and all the music moguls he had tried to contact on Jimmy’s behalf. “What’s everyone waiting for?” Doc’s words practically screamed. “He’s sixty-two years old, he’ll die, and there’ll be a hot funeral. Everybody will show up in hip mourning clothes and talk about how great he was….I’m getting good and pissed at the affluent members of the music community who sit around and pontificate and let those kind of tragedies happen again and again….Let’s do something now.”

But it wasn’t until he sang at Doc’s funeral three-and-a half years later, as Joe McEwen writes in his accompanying tribute, that Jimmy finally got his break. Joe and Bill Bentley had been advocating for him for years, but it was only after his performance at the funeral that he was offered a recording contract and finally became known to the world at large. And the song that he sang, George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” like Mac Rebennack’s equally heartbreaking, just as unashamedly sentimental tribute to his friend, “My Buddy,” spoke volumes about the spirit not just of the man but of the music.

One final note, just to give an idea of the celebratory nature of the occasion: Doc, the music, the moment, got a standing ovation as the casket was rolled up the aisle.