A long way from home
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Fourteen years ago I was living in Minneapolis. Driving home, listening to the radio, I heard such a stunning female jazz vocalist rendition of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" that I pulled over to listen closely to the song. After it ended the DJ said "I still can't believe that's Little Jimmy Scott. That's Little Jimmy Scott!" I couldn't believe it either. About a week before this my dad had read a story about Scott's sudden rediscovery and revival, found it fascinating and told me all about it. Now, here Scott was on the radio--that soaring, heartbroken, androgynous voice. As brilliant as advertised.The following day I bought every Scott CD I could find--Lost and Found just came out and they had reissued several others. Then, a couple months later, in the dead of a typically brutal Minneapolis winter, I found out that Scott was playing at a club in St. Paul. Even though my old car had long since died, I rode my bike an hour across the twin cities to the club and sat at a small table in a smoky club in my snow-splattered clothes. That evening is now a blur, but I remember the pianist saying, after Scott sang Motherless Child, "You know, it's hard to read music with tears in your eyes."Last fall, I got a rare night off to go hear Scott perform at a local college. He's very frail now and frequently leaves the stage between songs. However, on that night he once again summoned the jazz gods on his performance of Motherless Child and left us all with tears in our eyes.
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