Jimmy Scott: The jazz survivor

If ever a life deserved a major documentary film (a couple of minor ones have been made already), it's that of Jimmy Scott. The 77-year-old vocalist from Cleveland, Ohio, who's in London for a week of performances at Ronnie Scott's beginning on Monday, has probably experienced enough drama, pain and loss for a whole mini-series. A friend of Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, and a major influence on everyone from Johnny Ray to Marvin Gaye, Scott revolutionised the art of jazz and pop singing by slowing tempos to a crawl and putting so much naked emotion into the lyrics that his audiences – and sometimes Scott himself – ended up in tears.

His reward for all this invention has been almost nothing apart from more pain and more loss. Or at least that was the case until the past 12 years or so, when old friends such as Doc Pomus (at whose funeral Scott sang "Someone to Watch Over Me", moving the Sire Records boss Seymour Stein so much that he immediately signed him up), Frankie Valli and Joe Pesci and new ones such as Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, David Lynch and Madonna, offered help or employment.

Until then, Scott's career was a series of disasters, while his personal life endured a Russian novel's worth of calamity, including tragic bereavement, four broken marriages and a drink problem. Even nature was against him: Scott's remarkable alto voice – frequently compared to Holiday and Dinah Washington, another friend – is partly the result of his rare hereditary condition, the hormonal deficiency known as Kallmann's syndrome. This was also responsible for his small stature and boyish face; added to racism, it caused continual prejudice and discrimination. But now, after battling these obstacles for much of his life, the good news is that Scott has at last won a small yet secure cult following. The bad news is that it's taken so long that his voice is nearly gone. Even so, the ruins are still very impressive.

This year could even be Scott's annus mirabilis. The same day he starts his week at Ronnie's, Rhino Records releases the great "lost" album, Falling in Love is Wonderful, recorded in 1962 for Ray Char-les's Tangerine label but withdrawn when Herman Lubinsky, Scott's old boss at Savoy Records, threatened an injunction. Most significantly, there was the publication last year of Faith In Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott by David Ritz, the author of the celebrated Divided Soul, a life of Marvin Gaye.

The Scott biography is a great read, but the piling up of misfortune upon misfortune is at times hard to bear without recourse to strong drink. If this is the case for the reader, who can blame Scott himself for a dependence on the bottle? Interestingly, in the book Scott insists that he doesn't have a problem, and that he just likes to maintain a mellow high with whisky and jazz cigarettes; meanwhile, his surviving siblings and ex-wives and girlfriends talk of a Jekyll and Hyde-like transformation.

On meeting Jimmy Scott, it's difficult to believe that he can be anything less than the angel he sounds like in song, although he betrays unease by chain-smoking and scratching at the palm of his hand. His striking features look only a little feminine (Ritz reports that he's routinely addressed as "madam" by shopkeepers, a slight he feels deeply, however unintended it is) and more Native American.

The speaking voice is soft and gentle, the vocabulary full of ornament, like his singing. Asked whether his hereditary condition has been a burden to him, Scott is philosophical. "In a way, but you're grateful for what you manage to take back. My mother was always very straight on that, because it came from her side of the family; it came down in generations, and you just learnt to deal with it. Music stopped me thinking about it except when I was with a chick... Sure, I would have liked to have a child to raise myself, but I sit back and share the joy of my family's children."

In the book, Scott says: "The deficiency is present at birth. It wasn't until the mid-Forties that a cat named Franz J Kallmann, a New York geneticist and psychiatrist, spelt it out, calling it a rare disorder whose two chief characteristics are an inability to experience puberty and the absence of the sense of smell. Nowadays it can be treated. Back then we were still in the dark ages." Two of Scott's uncles, Bern and Jack, had already died from indirect, psychological consequences attendant on the "deficiency" before Scott was diagnosed, along with his brother Kenny, at the age of 13. Six months later – in the single most significant moment of Scott's life – his beloved mother Justine was killed by a drunk driver and the 10 siblings were split up and sent to different foster homes.

The complications arising from this tragedy have haunted Scott and his brothers and sisters to this day. Abandoned by their father – a feckless ladies' man, whom Scott would later see in Cleveland bars where he was performing, but who never gave him praise – and also by their mother's middle-class relatives, who disapproved of the father's dark skin-colour and working-class background, the Scotts never had a family home again. The resulting insecurity may also have been partly responsible for Scott's failure to make the most of his few chances of success; to have one injunction from Herman Lubinsky might be unfortunate, but a second – after he recorded The Source for Atlantic in 1969 – looks like carelessness. The bitter truth is that neither Tangerine nor Atlantic thought enough of Scott to put up a fight.

For his part, Scott denies any negligence. "The sad part of those eras, that time, was that there were hardly any lawyers involved in entertainment law, at least outside the movie business. I knew that I had no contract with the man [Lubinsky is long dead but Scott still seems afraid to name him], but he put up a bluff. Many people feared this man, they knew how cruel he was. He was a lawyer himself and he owned Little Esther's life." The late Esther Phillips, like Scott, would routinely have years added to her contract in return for advances of cash.

After the Tangerine album, instead of staying in Los Angeles and fighting his corner, Scott accompanied his delinquent father back home to Cleveland, where he ended up working in the Sheraton hotel for the next two decades until an industrial accident got him ill-health retirement (the singer Nancy Wilson, perhaps Scott's most flagrant imitator, recalls being on tour in Cleveland; when the hotel elevator's doors opened, there was "Little" Jimmy Scott operating it, in a uniform two sizes too big).

After a life like that, it's great to see Scott's present upturn in fortunes, however belated. Almost all his recordings are available, from the wonderful early sides with Lionel Hampton (whose manager and wife, Gladys, pinched a co-composer's credit from Scott on the hit Everybody's Somebody's Fool, which was later recorded by Michael Jackson), to his current series for Fantasy.

In the context of Scott's forthcoming London appearances, it's useful to remember, too, his bizarre album of 1998, Holding Back the Years, in which Scott does a great version of Elton John's "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word". "Now there's a guy I'd like to meet, because I believe he has more material," Scott told me on the phone from Cleveland. "I fell in love with him when I heard that 'Candle in the Wind' about your poor Queen." Could a duet with Sir Elton be on the cards? You'd better book your tickets now, just in case.

Jimmy Scott and the Jazz Expressions, Ronnie Scott's, London W1 (020-7439 0747), 13-18 January. 'Falling in Love is Wonderful' is out on Monday on Rhino Records. 'Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott' by David Ritz, Da Capo Press, £15.99