Among the best stories in Faith in Time, David Ritz's new biography of Little Jimmy Scott, is the one about how Joe Pesci used to follow the singer around, from one club to another, in the New Jersey of the 1950s. Back then, Pesci was a singer, and modelled himself so closely on his idol that he was known professionally as Little Joe Pesci.
But that was a long time ago. Pesci became a successful actor, saloon singers fell from favour in New Jersey clubs and Jimmy Scott went through periods of rejection and obscurity before re-emerging 10 years ago to claim his rightful place in the hierarchy of jazz singers.
This week there is a whiff of old New Jersey in Soho as the singer takes up residency at Ronnie Scott's, proving that the natural habitat of jazz is not the concert hall, but amid the smoke and hum of a club.
In fact, there was almost total silence on Monday night as Scott enraptured the first of the week's full houses with his idiosyncratic interpretations of But Beautiful, All of Me, Embraceable You and the rest, accompanied by a fine quartet. At 77, he may have lost some firmness of tone and precision of pitching but, in the business of sustaining tension at slow tempos, he remains virtually peerless.
What would have happened to him had his greatest album, Falling in Love Is Wonderful, not been suppressed after only a couple of weeks on release by the threat of legal action? This month, 40 years later, it is getting a proper release, and the world can see that Scott and his producer, Ray Charles, created an album only a hair's breadth away from ranking with Frank Sinatra's Only for the Lonely, Billie Holiday's Lady in Satin and Willie Nelson's Stardust among the greatest of its type.
No recording, however, can match the experience of seeing this dapper little man in person, throwing his arms wide and grimacing with remembered pain as his quavering countertenor imbues Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, a song he has been singing for most of his life, with a uniquely elegant sense of tragedy and loss.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7439 0747
