Jimmy Scott
The Source
1970, Atlantic Records
You ever get lonely? I’m talking about that big, dark feeling where no one cares about you and the serpent is about to strike. That bleak silence. That cold wind that blows through your soul.
Nothing seems important anymore. Nothing matters. The daytime sun hurts your eyes. The night is too dark. Nothing is satisfying. You don’t belong.
It’s a big, big world, but somehow there’s no room in it for you.
Maybe in the past you had some ideas about how this life could all work out, but that fell apart somewhere along the way. Maybe you know exactly when that happened. Or maybe you have no idea. It just happened.
A million dollars couldn’t solve it. You don’t even know how to talk about it.
You’re broken, baby. And nobody knows how to put you back together. Not even you know how to do it.
I can’t think of a single singer on Earth who conjures up that feeling better than Jimmy Scott.
Both life and the music business took turns kicking him around.
He was born with one of the oddest genetic disorders out there. Kallman’s syndrome. When you’ve got that, puberty passes right by you. While your skin and bones age, some part of your genetic make-up still thinks that you’re ten years old and you don’t grow and your voice doesn’t change in the same way as other men.
By accident, this condition produced the sound of a ragged angel. Androgynous. Soaring with vibrato. A little unconventional, but painfully human. One of the most fragile instruments to ever front a jazz combo. As a singer, you might say that Jimmy Scott isn’t far removed from jazz great Nancy Wilson, who started after him and who acknowledged his influence on her own work. My silly little ears also hear a passing resemblance to Dionne Warwick, but neither of those examples come within a hundred miles of nailing down what he really sounds like.
After all, a voice is just pretty decoration without some soul behind it and Scott had plenty of that to share. There are worlds of real life pain in his performances. He’s a man who can’t be conventional so he doesn’t even try. Scott pauses in unusual places. He stretches out notes in moments you wouldn’t expect. He’s a real jazz singer. Totally distinctive. On his own path. He makes every song sound like something out of a dream.
Scott can take a song that you’ve heard a million times and make it sound completely different while he still respects it. He caresses every word in the lyrics–their sound, their meaning–like he’s the first singer to ever notice them. However, far from being “difficult” in any way, Scott’s interpretations of standards are some of the most beautiful out there.
Every time the man sings, the sky gets a little darker and more moody and a gentle rain falls.
Case in point: Scott’s take here on “Unchained Melody”. It’s a song that’s as beaten to a pulp as any other. A thousand assholes have performed it. The most famous version by The Righteous Brothers stands today well-mummified by oldies radio overplay and film licensing. I never need to hear it again. It’s got nothing to do with my life. It’s a song for movie stars and parodies and TV commercials.
Jimmy Scott’s version though is a slow walk through the melody. It tastes every little change and turn and syllable. It’s a love ballad turned inside out and improved for the effort. Like everything that Scott sings, it becomes a song about pure loneliness. He zeroes in on its yearning until that’s all there is. I don’t recommend it for romantic slow dances. My prescription: Listen to it alone, preferably after dark, sometime when feelings of regret and things gone wrong are chewing you up pretty good.
The torchy, wee hours ballad is Scott’s speciality. Or that’s what every song becomes when he’s done with it, at least. The club is empty. The room is dark. Just a few members of the house band remain. The only light in the room shines directly on him and he’s singing just for you.
The eight songs here roam freely over the previous thirty years of jazz, pop and R&B. A few big band era standards, “Day By Day” and “This Love of Mine” , show up here in interpretations that are as much sensual clouds of smoke as they are songs. Meanwhile, Scott’s version of “On Broadway” strolls New York City’s most famous street and sees both the bright lights and the burned-out bulbs. He sees both the shiny marquees and the ignored souls on the sidewalk.
A religious man, Scott’s version of “Our Day Will Come” sees a bright light ahead. Maybe it shines in this life or maybe it shines in the next one.
By the time we get to “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”, it feels like we’re violating Scott’s privacy by even listening to this. It’s a song that dates back to 19th century Negro spirituals and Scott, who lost his mother to a car accident at age 13, adopted it as his unofficial theme song. He recorded it in 1960 and then again ten years later for this album, arranged as more slow after-midnight jazz. When Scott was rediscovered in the 90s and treated like a legend, he often performed it live, never running out of ways to tell us that “This world is lonely and cold”.
Scott was about 45 years old when he recorded this. His music career went back to the late 1940s when he performed with the likes of Lionel Hampton and Charlie Parker, singing on records for which he either got no credit or saw his credit handed to another singer. When he got to make a few LPs in the early 60s under his own name for Ray Charles’s Tangerine label, they were shortly withdrawn from release due to a hideous old contract that Scott signed with Savoy Records’ Herman Lubinsky that supposedly kept Scott beholden to Lubinsky for life.
In the midst of that, this album was recorded for Atlantic Records in 1969 by seasoned jazz maven Joel Dorn, who’d produced LPs by Yusef Lateef, Freddie Hubbard and Shirley Scott. It would suffer the same fate as Jimmy Scott’s early 60s albums. Totally unreleased beyond promo copies for thirty years.
Scott worked odd jobs in the meantime. Elevator man. Hospital orderly. He wouldn’t reach his heyday until the early 1990s, when he was well into his 60s. Lou Reed gave him a guest spot singing on his great Magic & Loss album (a future entry in this series whenever I feel up to writing about the most depressing album ever made). David Lynch cast him for a brief appearance in the flummoxing final episode (at the time) of Twin Peaks, which was my own first exposure to Scott back in June of 1991. Like a true fanboy, I analyzed everything about the episode and so when Scott signed to Sire/Warner Bros. and began putting out new albums (I was a teenage jazz dork and a reader of Downbeat magazine, at the time), it made it to my radar and I was all over it.
Lubinsky was dead and Scott was free. From here on out, labels would treat him like a star, his picture on every cover. His 1992 comeback, All the Way, went for strings and heavy romantic vibes, as produced by big name Tommy LiPuma (coming off of a major hit with Natalie Cole’s Unforgettable album). His next one, Dream, produced by Mitchell Froom, went for blue moods with sad standards from way back and a band that was pared down to the barest essentials.
Scott would keep going from there, making more new albums, touring the world, and enjoying the happy ending that he spent most of his life unsure that he’d ever get. (He’d pass at a ripe old age in 2014, about a month shy of his 90th birthday.)
All of Scott’s comeback discs are worth hearing. The formula is simple. Just get a small band who know how to play like it’s 3 AM–a piano, a bass and drums are all you need–and then put almost any song ever written in front of Scott and he’ll make it his own and break your heart into a thousand pieces with it.
The Source is, well, the source. Scott’s earlier records are all great, but this is the first album that treats him as something special, a voice that needs no studio sweetening, a singer worth getting on tape even if it means violating a contract. The production is light, but the mood is heavy.
This is not breezy stuff that you play in the background. It’s a companion for the lonelyhearts and the other motherless children from a singer who’s been there, from a guy who’s working low-paying dayjobs despite having one of the most beautiful voices in the world.
Its audience won’t just love it.
They’ll need it.