What It Sounds Like to Have Your Heart Broken

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Sometimes when you’re feeling down, you have the mistaken idea that things can’t possibly get any worse. Well, you’re wrong – they can. And when you absolutely hit bottom, you may start thinking that maybe you would settle for things being merely bad. That is a feeling Jimmy Scott can capture like no other.


Mr. Scott, who opens a week-long engagement at Iridium tonight, occasionally will come to the word “love” at the end of a line in a song. The way he sings it, though, it doesn’t sound like “love”; it sounds more like “lo-uh-ve.” He’ll take that long “uh” sound in the middle, twist the hell out of it, inject it with a slight flatness, and let the pitch drop. This is what it sounds like to have your heart broken.


Of all the upper-echelon vocal artists in jazz or pop, Mr. Scott deals most exclusively in heartbreak. His tempos are almost exclusively the slowest in music. His albums uniformly contain nothing but one killer ballad after another. Far from taking a sad song and making it better, Mr. Scott could make “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” sound sad. Even those two other living masters of the snail’s pace, Shirley Horn and Andy Bey, may feel the need to, at least once or twice an evening, speed it up a little bit for the sake of variety – not Jimmy Scott.


He has always had this talent. Quincy Jones, who joined Lionel Hampton’s band just around the time that Mr. Scott left it in the late 1940s, described his performances this way: “He’d just stand there with his shoulders hunched, his eyes closed and his head tilted to one side. He sang like a horn – he sang with the melodic content of an instrument. … Jimmy used to tear my heart out every night.”


Mr. Scott – who for most of his career worked under the name “Little” Jimmy Scott – has a bluesman’s sense of distortion. He hardly ever sings an actual 12-bar blues, but the way he sings standards and ballads has led people to believe the songs belong closer to the stylistic universe of B.B. King than Frank Sinatra.


Mr. Scott can sing with impeccable diction, in what sounds like a falsetto (technically it isn’t – he sings in his natural voice, the same one he uses for everyday speech). But he often distorts a phrase so overwhelmingly it sounds like he’s gargling it. On his 1952 recording of “Why Was I Born?” he just ever so slightly rushes Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics, so it comes out like “Why wazza born.” Likewise, on “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” and “I Wish I Knew,” he repeatedly mispronounces the second word as “I Wisht,” and makes that reinvented pronunciation sound so impeccably right.


Mr. Scott puts one in mind of Thelonious Monk in the way he reinvents melodies in his own image. You’re going along, following the tune the way you’re used to hearing it. Then – boom! – here comes the zinger, that little twist of pitch and inflection that stabs right into your heart, just like Monk’s funky little chromaticisms that occur right where you least expect them. Time-wise, Scott is no less original – he sings legato, but clips his phrases in staccato fashion.


The sight of Jimmy Scott is almost as unique as his sound. The term “Little” isn’t just a nickname. Mr. Scott suffers from a hormonal deficiency, a condition known as Kallman’s Syndrome, which causes the body to stop growing at the point when it normally reaches adolescence. Thus his voice remains a very high, boyish tenor. He is just 4 feet 11 inches tall. And he has excessively soft, almost feminine features.


Mr. Scott certainly has had one of the strangest musical careers of the last century. Born in Cleveland in 1925, he was one of 10 siblings, most of whom were raised in various foster homes after their mother was killed in a car accident. His original stage mentor was a lady contortionist named Estelle “Caledonia” Young, whose tent show played for black audiences across the South and Midwest. Supposedly, Mr. Scott was already singing songs of heartbreak in that high-pitched, piercing voice by the early 1940s.


In 1948, he signed on as boy singer with Hampton, a post filled earlier by Joe Williams. Williams never had the chance to record with Hampton; Mr. Scott did, but it was near the end of his tenure with the band. The result was just four titles, but one of them – “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” would be the closest thing he’s ever had to a hit and a career perennial. Though Mr. Scott made a substantial contribution to the song itself, his royalties as both co-songwriter and singer went to the Hamptons.


This sort of thing was always happening to Mr. Scott. On the few opportunities when he got a nice break – such as when one of his “students,” the great Ray Charles, wanted to record Mr. Scott on his Tangerine label – something came along to louse it up.


The Scott album produced by Charles, “Falling in Love Is Wonderful” is probably his finest. But because of contractual problems, it was never properly distributed. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, Mr. Scott was out of music entirely, working as a shipping clerk at the Sheraton Hotel in his native Cleveland.


In the meantime, R &B songwriter Doc Pomus beat the drums for Jimmy with just about every producer in the business. At Pomus’s funeral, industry bigwigs finally heard Mr. Scott again and he wound up with a contract with the Warner Bros. imprint Sire Records. Between 1992’s “All the Way” and this year’s “Live in Japan,” he has done nearly 10 albums – almost more than in his entire career previously.


Mr. Scott’s late ’60s and early ’70s were, at last, his glory years. He sang brilliantly and hobnobbed with celebrities like Lou Reed and Madonna. In the past few years, he’s crafted four generally excellent releases for Milestone with producer Todd Barkan, who has had the good sense to use Mr. Scott’s regular working quartet – the linchpin of which is bassist Hilliard Greene. Two of the most overwhelming tracks I’ve ever heard are “Those Who Were” (by bassist Nils Henning Orsted-Pederson, on “Moon Glow”) and his age-75 take on “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” (on “Over The Rainbow”), in which he gazes so deeply into the human condition it’s positively scary.


It’s a great, great thing that Jimmy Scott came back to us – even if it was only to break our hearts again.


The New York Sun

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