Jimmy Scott's frailty just adds to his performance reviewS
The twilight becomes Jimmy Scott.
Saturday night at Alverno College's Pitman Theater, Scott seemed to carry all of his 79 hard-lived years on stage with him. He walked slowly, stiffly, painfully, with a pronounced limp. Age and Kallmann syndrome working in tandem have frozen his diminutive body in a withered caricature of childhood.
Because of the rare genetic condition, Scott never achieved normal adult growth. For almost all of his one-hour set, he performed seated on a stool and sang only about a half-dozen songs. He seemed as fragile as a snowflake.
Yet that very fragility works for him. The once-great voice has lost the brilliant sheen of its youth. Yet, like Billie Holiday at the end, the fraying merely underscores the poignancy. There has always been a painful yet magical vulnerability about little Jimmy Scott, and the frailty of age merely reinforces it.
It shows up in unexpected ways. On the face of it, "All the Way" is not a sad song. If anything, it's an upbeat affirmation of the power of commitment. But in the hands of Scott, a transformation takes place. He slows it way down, at perhaps half the tempo Frank Sinatra did it.
The phrasing is halting, the sentiment tender. There is a sense of wisdom and reflection. This is an affirmation from a man who has tasted the bitter with the sweet, and he understands the power of both.
The phrasing is really quite remarkable. Saturday's set list came from some of the most familiar pages of the American songbook "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," "Embraceable You," "Masquerade," "Blue Skies" yet the readings were strikingly singular.
There are prolonged and unexpected pauses: "Sometimes . . . I feel . . . like a motherless child."
Scott was orphaned at 14. He almost murmurs the lines. You have the sense of a wound that has never healed.
Even with the short set, Scott's band, the Jazz Messengers, was obviously there in part to lessen the load. They opened the evening with an instrumental set and took center stage for an up-tempo "Secret Love" while Scott took a mid-set break.
From the look of things Saturday, it was natural to wonder if we are likely to see Scott again. If not, Alverno gave its patrons a special privilege, a closing glimpse of a remarkable stylist who has taken his life's greatest affliction and turned it into powerful art.
Copyright 2005, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)
Copyright 2005 Journal Sentinel Inc. Note: This notice does not
apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through
wire services or other media
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