Film captures life, music of Jimmy Scott

“You learn not to let the bad times overpower the existence of your being,” jazz singer Jimmy Scott says early on in “Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew,” a ramshackle but affecting documentary on his life and music that airs Sunday night on PBS as part of the network’s “The Independent Lens” series.

Born in Cleveland in 1925, Scott has known more than his share of the bad. He suffered from Kallmann’s Syndrome, a rare hormonal deficiency that kept his body from maturing. He never hit puberty, in other words, and has a voice and bearing that on a grown man can read as strange, and led to the sobriquet “Little Jimmy Scott.”

The death of his mother when he was 13 had a lifelong effect, right down to his choice of material. (The version of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” he sings here is chilling.) And through a career that included black vaudeville, bebop, rhythm and blues and the sort of artful pop that inspires a cult, he suffered from the vagaries of a music business that variously denied him credit, royalties and the right to record.

Shot and directed by Matthew Buzzell, who has also made short profiles of rock musician Dean Wareham and outsider singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston, “If You Only Knew” is an unusually languorous documentary, as if taking cues from Scott’s own singing style. (He sings so far behind the beat that a frustrated Charles Mingus once stormed out of a session.)

A long opening sequence that takes the singer from New York to the stage of a Tokyo concert hall is particularly lovely.

The film does not hammer you with facts. There is no narration, for one thing, only an occasional title card to organize the tale. Nor does it trot out the cultural big guns -- such latter-day fans as Madonna, who has called him “the only singer who makes me cry,” or Lou Reed, who used him on his 1992 album “Magic and Loss,” or David Lynch, who put him in the final episode of “Twin Peaks” -- to certify his art with their celebrity.

The story proceeds through the reminiscences and observations of Scott’s family, friends and collaborators old and new, who can get quite emotional about him, and biographer David Ritz, a particularly helpful voice. But, for the most part, it lets the singer make his own case. He is not always easy to follow in conversation, but Buzzell is generous with performance, and that is the best argument.

Not growing up didn’t keep Scott from growing old -- indeed, the film opens pointedly on his hands, which are those of any septuagenarian. His voice has lost much of its former semi-operatic power, and his vibrato has grown wider as his days grow short. And yet age has perhaps made him a more subtle and artful singer, and his strengths -- the notes he chooses, his singular phrasing and the intensity of his emotion -- are still in place.

Scott’s dark side is alluded to but not deeply explored. He had a drinking problem, some anger-management issues and for a while he packed a pistol. Permanent pre-adolescence did not stop him from collecting four ex-wives, two of whom were prostitutes. (He married for the fifth time last December.) His years of obscurity, or retirement -- in which he was among other things, a waiter, a dishwasher and a nurse’s aide -- are glossed over.

Scott began singing again in 1984, but it wasn’t until the next decade, after he was rediscovered singing at the funeral of songwriter Doc Pomus, that his comeback properly began. He works now to bigger crowds in better venues in more countries than he ever had before.

His major-label debut, “All the Way,” was nominated for a Grammy, and though it’s fair to say he’s not a household name even now, he continues to make records, while his old ones are back in print. Already this year he’s sung in Vienna, Paris, London, New York and Istanbul, Turkey. The film leaves him watching fireworks with his brothers and sisters, Little Jimmy, happy at last.

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‘Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew’

Where: PBS

What: Part of the “Independent Lens” documentary series

When: 11 p.m. Sunday to 12:30 a.m. Monday

Director, Matthew Buzzell. Producer, Brian Gerber.