Also this issue: Cloaking Devices Susan Fenton and Anne Seidman create revealing work that plays hard to get. -Robin Rice Paradise Redefined -Susan Hagen First Friday Focus Politics Unusual -A.D. Amorosi Becoming: Shakespeare -Debra Auspitz The Outside In -Sam Adams Anatomy Lessons -Meredith Broussard The (Un)Beat(en) Generation -Paul Burress

October 3- 9, 2002

artpicks

Scott Free

The story of singer Jimmy Scott -- jazz's littlest man with its biggest haunted voice, an androgynous alto that creeps into the recesses of your soul -- is legendary: a prodigious vocal range squandered on lousy producers; unscrupulous management and label men taking advantage of size, race and affliction; triumph over the emasculation of Kallman's Syndrome. As a musician, all Scott wanted was string and brass following him. As a man, all Scott wanted was respect. At 77, Scott's wishes are fulfilled; the working crooner is celebrated in stark, sensational form by Matthew Buzzell's documentary Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew. But it's the achingly detailed Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott (Da Capo) that brings Scott and biographer David Ritz to Philly. Ritz has proved he can tackle the most scarred musical lives, having penned Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye and Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story. With Faith, Ritz shows, through interviews with colleagues, wives and Scott himself, an unlikely life: an angel, left for dead, reborn as jazz's finest purveyor of hope, made whole and flourishing.

Jimmy Scott and David Ritz, Sat., Oct. 5, 1 p.m., Free Library, 19th and Vine sts., 215-567-4341.

—A.D. Amorosi