"In my whole career the NEA Jazz Masters Award is the greatest gift I ever received. It is an honor to receive this award."

For more than five decades, vocalist Jimmy Scott has numbered among the jazz world's best singers with his select group of fans. No less an authority than Billie Holiday named Scott -- and only Scott -- as a vocalist she admired. Although he was, for a period, "perhaps the most unjustly ignored American singer of the 20th century" (according to Joseph Hooper in a New York Times Magazine profile), Scott today is once more finding a dedicated international audience for his emotionally penetrating art.

Scott was born in 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, and as a child was diagnosed with Kallmann syndrome, a rare condition that prevented him from experiencing puberty -- therefore his voice never changed, giving his singing an almost otherworldly sound. He got his first big break in 1949 when Lionel Hampton hired him and billed him as "Little Jimmy Scott." As featured vocalist with the Hampton big band, Scott achieved fame in 1950 with the ballad "Everybody's Somebody's Fool." His success continued throughout the next decade, notably with his hit recording in 1955 of the old Bing Crosby favorite "When Did You Leave Heaven?," a song that he made his own.

Scott subsequently spent long periods away from the microphone, working for a time as a hotel shipping clerk and as a caretaker for his ailing father. He returned to the stage in 1985 and began recording again in 1990, and his career took off again two years later when Seymour Stein heard him perform at songwriter Doc Pomus's funeral and signed him to the Warner Brothers Sire label. His resurgence in the public eye included appearances on Lou Reed's 1992 recording Magic and Loss and in an episode of David Lynch's 1990s television series Twin Peaks.

Selected Discography

The Savoy Years and More, Savoy, 1952-72
Falling in Love is Wonderful, Rhino, 1962
All the Way, Sire, 1992
Holding Back the Years, Artists Only, 1998
Over the Rainbow, Milestone, 2000

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