Jimmy Scott died yesterday. I hadn’t realized he had been alive. Like a lot of people, I first heard about him from Jimmy McDonough’s profile "For whatever the reason: all the way with Jimmy Scott," in the Winter 1988 Rock & Roll Quarterly supplement to the Village Voice. It was the most heartbreaking story I’d ever read. But more important, it made me seek out the music.
Scott doesn’t have a lot of range or variety: he’s always quiet, slow and sad. His music does not impose itself. But if you attend, he speaks with such authority and honesty and art that nothing else seems worthwhile.
Now, in retrospect, he's obviously one of those mid-century musicians—jazz and classical—who devoted all their art to crafting nuances rather than making a big sound. He dissected a phrase, elongating a syllable into a wail. Unmistakably a delineation of despair, but also a pure tone presented for the pleasure of it. Its painstakingly calibrated degrees of grain, its contour like the blunt but exact forms of an Ellsworth Kelly drawing. Artistry making it possible to face down despair.
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