Singing a Different Tune : Jimmy Scott Comes to Terms With a Cruel Affliction

Jimmy Scott approaches the microphone like a bashful lover, hands clasped before him and head tilted sideways. A jazz quartet eases in behind him and Scott starts into the opening lines of the 1940s standard “All of Me.” But the words are barely out of his mouth before a reaction ripples through the crowd at New York’s Bottom Line nightclub. Jaws drop, people gasp and somewhere in the darkness a woman moans, “Oh my lawd!”

At 67, Jimmy Scott has not lost his ability to startle. To the uninitiated, Scott’s voice is a shock in itself--quavering, impossibly high, it has the smoky contralto timber of a woman. Then there is the singer himself, a small androgynous figure in heavy black-rimmed spectacles, standing stiffly inside his tuxedo like an altar boy trapped in an age-worn body.

It’s not difficult to see why Scott, in his 1950s heyday, was sometimes rumored to be a woman in disguise. The real source of the singer’s mesmerizing sexual ambiguity is a hereditary condition passed down from his mother, but that was something Scott himself never spoke about publicly. For although it gave him a haunting voice, it also burdened him with personal demons that helped turn his life into a litany of failed marriages and lost opportunities.

Yet unlike so many of his postwar jazz contemporaries, Jimmy Scott is still alive to tell his story. And when Scott plays Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood tonight through Sunday, he will be promoting his first major-label record in almost two decades. “All of Me” (Sire Records) features Scott’s rendering of nine classic ballads backed by an all-star jazz quintet, with string arrangements by Johnny Mandel and others.

Scott’s pleasure at this turn of events was unmistakable as he strode through Midtown Manhattan on a recent fall afternoon, stooping to pick up a dime and then holding it aloft like a prize.

“Hey, I found a million,” he laughed in that strangely feminine rasp. “I found a million, babe.”

A dapper dresser with a penchant for arcane hep-talk, Scott looks like an apparition stepped out of the 1940s: dark blue suit, burgundy tie with gold clip, signet ring glinting on a manicured hand, graying kinks of hair greased back at the temples. At the Italian restaurant where we have lunch, he shakes his head when confronted with the huge menu and mutters, “Crazy!”

Scott first came to New York in 1948, an aspiring 23-year-old singer with a troubled past, a supernatural voice and a burning anxiety to be heard. Born into a large family in Cleveland and raised in foster homes after his mother died, he had been touring the South in a tent show run by contortionist Estelle Young, and by 1950 he was making his first recordings with Lionel Hampton’s band.

Billed as Little Jimmy Scott--he was barely five feet tall at the time--this diminutive figure delivered wrenching ballads in his high and haunting voice, reducing women to paroxysms of desire that seemed to be equal parts sexual and maternal. Singers like Ray Charles, Ruth Brown and Frankie Valli cite him as a seminal influence, but Scott was fated to suffer the neglect that afflicted so many postwar black musicians. On top of the perennial traps of the time--racism, booze, exploitative records companies--he was grappling with deeply troubling personal problems that few could comprehend.

At 19, Scott had found out he suffered from Kallman’s Syndrome, a hereditary disorder that blocks a man’s sexual development: His voice never changed, and his sexual organs didn’t mature.

The singer’s mother never warned him about the genetic time bomb that ran in the family--she died when he was 13, and his father all but disappeared in the years immediately after her death. Shielded from the truth by protective older siblings, Jimmy Scott found out about his affliction the hard way.

“All I thought was: ‘Hey, I’m a guy, and I gotta get me a gal, and it’s gon’ be cool.’ ” Scott clicks his fingers, imitating the lazy lope of a teen-age Casanova, then freezes in mid-pose. “And boom!--’Wait a minute, there’s something wrong here--this thing ain’t happening.’ ”

Scott then set out to learn about his problem. Today, there are hormone treatments for Kallman’s Syndrome, but by the time Scott found out about them he knew they would alter his preternatural voice. For decades he suffered rumors and harassment without discussing his condition and today, when Scott glides up to the yearning high notes of a song like “The Masquerade Is Over,” it’s impossible not to think of the cruel hand he was dealt. A gift and a curse, Kallman’s Syndrome gave him an angel’s voice and demon’s brew of problems.

By the 1950s, the psychological toll was evident in the singer’s two failed marriages and frequent drinking binges, which generally ended with him “angry at the world because this relationship or this love affair had fallen through.” He also had the misfortune to sign with the late Herman Lubinsky, who was known in the jazz world for his onerous contracts and bargain-basement production values. Scott made good records and bad for Lubinsky; either way he hardly saw a dime from them and all are out of print.

Behind the scenes, heroin was decimating the singer’s friends and associates--Charlie Parker, singer Big Maybelle, sax player Sonny Stitt. His memories of that time are often sad ones: finding Stitt unconscious in a doorway on Broadway, watching Big Maybelle’s decline, gaining a false reputation of his own as a junkie-by-association.

“I’ve been affiliated with Bird and a whole lot of other cats, and the most I’ve ever done with them is share an apartment I might have had rather than see them on the . . . street,” Scott asserts. “Bird was at my apartment two weeks before they put him in the hospital. . . . When he hit the door he said: ‘Little bro, I wanna crash. Is it cool?’ I got accused for a lotta things because of things like that, because of my relationships with people.”

Perhaps the greatest artistic tragedy of Scott’s career was the fate of his album “Falling in Love Is Wonderful,” recorded with Ray Charles and the renowned arranger Marty Paich in 1962. Reveling in the collaboration, Scott cut 10 songs that many consider among his finest, but Savoy Records asserted it had Scott under exclusive contract and the record was withdrawn. The two decades that followed were Jimmy Scott’s lost years. He recorded albums that were never released and released albums that should never have been recorded, and his main income for many years came from a job as a shipping clerk with the Sheraton Hotel in Cleveland.

“I trusted a lotta crooks in my lifetime, hoping they’d really do something,” he admits. “To be honest, they knew the game better than I.”

Even when he returned to performing in 1985 at the urging of his third wife, Earlene, Scott was relegated to obscure New Jersey clubs and pick-up bands, lost in the backwoods of the jazz scene. In the mid-1980s, his voice was briefly resurrected on the Charlie Parker album “One Night at Birdland,” which included a bootleg nightclub recording of Parker and Scott jamming on “Embraceable You.” But the eerie voice on the record was mistakenly credited to female singer Chubby Newsome.

Away from the microphone, Jimmy Scott is far from melancholic today. He seems to have finally found a hard-earned peace, a rapprochement with the mistakes and injustices of the past. Four years ago he publicly spoke about Kallman’s Syndrome for the first time in an article in the Village Voice, and today even that affliction seems to have lost its cruel edge.

“I still don’t believe it has any reason to destroy your desires in life, and I don’t believe it’s any reason for an excuse about your life,” says Scott, his voice dropping to a nervous hush. “The biggest thing that has ever bothered me is not having sons and daughters. . . .”

Leaving the restaurant, Scott tips the coat-checker $5 and steps out, smiling despite the fall rain. He is standing on 52nd Street, the street where he got his first taste of the jazz life nearly half a century ago. Today the legendary jazz strip has disappeared and most of the figures from that time are ghosts, but Scott chuckles to himself.