Falling In Love Is Wonderful (2026 Remaster) Jimmy Scott

• 1 They Say It's Wonderful (2026 Remaster) 04:06
• 2 I Wish I Didn't Love You So (2026 Remaster) 04:03
• 3 There Is No Greater Love (2026 Remaster) 03:27
• 4 If I Should Lose You (2026 Remaster) 03:23
• 5 Why Try To Change Me Now (2026 Remaster) 04:51
• 6 I'm Getting Sentimental Over You (2026 Remaster) 03:54
• 7 Someone To Watch Over Me (2026 Remaster) 03:30
• 8 How Deep Is The Ocean (2026 Remaster) 03:38
• 9 I Didn't Know What Time It Was (2026 Remaster) 04:24
• 10 Sunday, Monday Or Always (2026 Remaster) 03:17
• Total Runtime 38:33

Info for Falling In Love Is Wonderful (2026 Remaster)

Jimmy Scott’s Falling In Love Is Wonderful finally returns in remastered form, reviving the long-lost 1963 debut that captured his singular voice in a masterclass of late-night balladry.

Now remastered and re-released more than six decades after its original short run, Jimmy Scott’s Falling In Love Is Wonderful remains one of vocal jazz’s great lost albums. Released in 1963 as the very first LP on Ray Charles’ Tangerine label, it should have introduced Scott to a much wider audience. Instead, it vanished almost as quickly as it arrived, pulled from shelves within weeks due to contract disputes that would shadow Scott’s career for years. What remains is one of the great “lost” albums of jazz, a record that feels fully formed yet somehow frozen in time.

Backed by arrangements from Marty Paich and Gerald Wilson and with Charles himself overseeing the sessions and contributing on piano, the album leans all the way into balladry. Ten standards, each one built to showcase Scott’s phrasing and that unmistakable high, aching voice that could stop you mid-sentence. Songs like “They Say It’s Wonderful,” “Someone To Watch Over Me,” and “How Deep Is The Ocean” don’t just revisit the Great American Songbook, they slow it down, strip it back, and sit with it.

Scott had admirers in high places, including Ella Fitzgerald and Charles himself, but his career never followed the arc it should have. The same legal issues that sidelined this album also derailed its follow-up, leaving him without the momentum that records like this usually create.

That context hangs over Falling In Love Is Wonderful, but it never weighs it down. If anything, it deepens the listening experience. There’s a fragility to Scott’s delivery that feels almost too intimate for a studio setting, like you’re hearing something not meant for a crowd. Critics at the time heard it too, praising the record before it disappeared, and over the years it quietly became a collector’s piece, passed around in bootlegs and whispers before finally returning decades later.

Jimmy Scott never got the mainstream spotlight this album should have delivered, but it still holds. Not because of its backstory, but because of how it sounds. Ten songs, handled with care, patience, and restraint. No excess, no flash, just Scott working inside each line until it lands exactly where it should.

"This album, one of the most highly sought jazz vocal records in history." (DownBeat)

Jimmy Scott, vocals
Ray Charles, piano

Produced by Ray Charles

Digitally remastered

Jimmy Scott
Scott was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Authur and Justine Stanard Scott, the third in a family of ten. As a child Jimmy got his first singing experience by his mother’s side at the family piano, and later, in church choir. At thirteen, he was orphaned when his mother was killed by a drunk driver.

He first rose to national prominence as “Little Jimmy Scott” in the Lionel Hampton Band when he sang lead on the late 1940s hit “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool”, recorded in December 1949, and which became a top ten R&B hit in 1950. Credit on the label, however, went to “Lionel Hampton and vocalists”, so the singer’s name did not appear on any of the songs. This omission of credit was not only a slight to Scott’s talent but a big blow to his career. A similar professional insult occurred several years later when his vocal on “Embraceable You” with Charlie Parker, on the album One Night in Birdland, was credited to female vocalist Chubby Newsome.

In 1963, it looked as though Scott’s luck had changed for the good. He was signed to Ray Charles’ Tangerine Records label, under the supervision of Charles himself, creating what is considered by many to be one of the great jazz vocal albums of all time, Falling in Love is Wonderful.

Owing to obligations on a contract that Scott had signed earlier with Herman Lubinsky, the record was yanked from the shelves in a matter of days, while Jimmy was honeymooning. Forty years later this cult album became available to the public again. Scott disputes the “lifetime” contract; Lubinsky loaned Jimmy out to Syd Nathan at King Records for 45 recordings in 1957–58. Another album, The Source (1969), was not released until 2001.

Scott’s career faded by the late 1960s and he returned to his native Cleveland to work as a hospital orderly, shipping clerk and as an elevator operator in a hotel.

Scott’s career has spanned sixty-five years. He has performed with Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Lester Young, Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, Fats Navarro, Quincy Jones, Bud Powell, Ray Charles, Wynton Marsalis, and Peter Cincotti. He has also performed with a host of musicians from other genres of music, such as David Byrne, Lou Reed, Flea, Michael Stipe, and Antony & The Johnsons. Scott performed at President Dwight Eisenhower’s (1953) and President Bill Clinton’s (1993) inaugurations, where he sang the same song, “Why Was I Born?”. Most recently Scott has appeared in live performances with Pink Martini, and he continues to perform internationally at music festivals and at his own concerts.

In 2007, Scott received the 2007 NEA Jazz Master Award. He also received the Kennedy Center’s “Jazz In Our Time” Living Legend Award, and N.A.B.O.B.’s Pioneer Award in 2007. In September 2008 he did a “two-day video interview” at his Vegas home with the “Smithsonian Institute for the National Archives”. Scott and his wife Jeanie have been living in Las Vegas, Nevada since 2007, after living in Euclid, Ohio, for 10 years.

Scott eventually resurfaced in 1991 when he sang at the funeral of his long-time friend Doc Pomus, an event that single-handedly sparked his career renaissance. Afterwards Lou Reed recruited him to sing back-up on the track “Power and Glory” from his 1992 album Magic and Loss, which was inspired, to an extent, by Pomus’s death. Scott was seen on the series finale of David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks, singing “Sycamore Trees”, a song with lyrics by Lynch and music by Angelo Badalamenti. Scott was featured on the soundtrack of the follow-up film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

In 2012, he joined the 11th[10] annual Independent Music Awards judging panel to assist independent musicians’ careers.

This album contains no booklet.