Word that Jimmy Scott was returning to San Francisco to perform went through me like a lightning bolt. I’ve committed to seeing more live music and certainly see performers considered legendary. I hold regret for not seeing Miles Davis at the Paramount. I missed Nina Simone. But after I was introduced to the hypnotic voice he has I became enthralled. NOT going is NOT acceptable.

I saw him for the first time maybe 2000 when I would’ve happily committed murder to get tickets. Now that he’s 85, I didn’t expect to see him on stage again– but he appeared at Yoshi’s San Francisco last night. I hadn’t been to the Yoshi’s in SF before– its situated in the heart of the Fillmore District, the city’s historically African American neighborhood with a long history of jazz music and musicians. The club was intimate– not intimate as in tiny, but intimate as in “Its like sitting with the band in your living room”. His band, the Jazz Expressions were bouncy and loose– a group of brothers become family and they skipped through the opening number.

Jimmy was wheeled by his wife onto the stage in a chair– I’d heard he recently broke his hip and for the tiniest moment I was startled and saddened. Those feelings were only mine. He looked great his skin vibrant and smooth as a silk lampshade. His cheeks full. He opened his mouth to free the first notes and coughed. The note stretched out over us only to tremble and collapse. Listening to his earlier work one does get the sense of delicacy of his singing– that what you’re hearing isn’t possible. That it sounds like a woman. There’s no way one’s chest could open and deliver such a pure lasting note. But he has more shattering moments on record like that to make him the greatest living stylist in jazz. He stepped across that moment and the room seemed to freeze as he inhaled and showed us his voice was Still There.

Listening to him sit amongst jazz musicians (he smiled like an infant, music being his heaven, the warm, strong arms embracing him) you realize his itself voice is a unique, well played instrument. His throat must be an antique cello of rare wood made from a prehistoric tree that doesn’t grow anymore.

He phrasing is unqiue; delicately disassembling the syllables of words and gently stepping over them. Stripping lines of songs like petals off a rose and leaving them to flutter in the wind. That’s what he sounds like. That’s why I was out in the rain to hear him. He performed the ancient standard Pennies From Heaven, but somehow erased the schmaltz and tradition of it and sang the song anew, as if he were making the lyrics up as he went along.

He is an elder with a heartbreaking gift. That he wasn’t in rare form is forgiven. At 85, I could only wish I’d even still be alive and even then, mobile. But he is a gifted elder and it was an honor to sit in audience and receive from a man so generous as to sing from a wheelchair as if his gift could heal him. Wasn’t his voice a miracle?

Scott’s life seems by product of a miracle. He was born with Kallmann’s Syndrome
a rare genetic condition which attacks the hypothalamus, delaying puberty in both boys and girls, keeping them short in stature, preventing the development of testosterone and effecting the ability to smell. This disease left 4′ 11″ vocalist Scott with androgynous, uniquely high soprano voice.

Scott was born one of 10 children to Arthur and Justine Scott in Cleveland, Ohio 1925. His mother was a musician and all of her children sang in church. Scott’s father wasn’t very active in his life, choosing to drink and gamble and chase women, so Scott doted on his mother. But Scott’s mother was killed in a car accident when he was 13.

First known as ‘Little Jimmy Scott,’ he began gathering attention in the 1940’s singing with Jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. Scott closed his show with the song he recorded with Hampton in 1949– Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool. In 1963, he recorded an acclaimed album ‘Falling In Love is Wonderful’ produced by Ray Charles and released on Charles’ Tangerine Label. But within days of the albums release, it was yanked from store shelves because of some SHADY contract he’d signed with notorious Herman Lubinsky at Savoy records.

His career halted, albums recorded in the 60’s vanished and Scott (it was said Billie Holiday would show up to his shows nightly to hear him) was forced to get a job back home in Cleveland as a shipping clerk in a Sheraton Hotel.

Scott disappeared from the scene so quickly his fans thought he was dead. He gave up on his career, drank heavily, skipped through four marriages and by the 1970’s worked in a nursing home and as a clerk.

In 1991, musician Doc Pomus died and Scott sang at his funeral. Sire label head Seymour Stein was in attendance at that funeral and signed Scott to a five album contract the following day. His comeback album, All The Way, led to him touring the world and at age 67 finding a brand new audience.

Personally, I’d say start where I started, with Lost & Found Its a CD i’ve had to buy several times over after loaning it to friends only to have it never return. When folks ask me “Who’s Jimmy Scott?” I ask them which would they prefer: Unchained Melody or Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.

After first time listeners note he sounds like a woman, there are no further questions. Just appreciative, absorbing silence. I remember playing it for my former roommates and how the house totally shut down while they listened and the man’s voice shone in angelic light from the speakers.

In the 1990’s, a cure had been found for Kallmann’s Syndrome, and Scott apparently refused it, saying it would rob him of his gift.

Scott’s career has lasted nearly sixty years. He’s performed with Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell, Wynton Marsalis, Lou Reed, David Byrne, David Lynch, & Flea.

I’ll leave you with his elegant translation of Bryan Ferry’s Slave To Love.