Soul Sister Number One
The million-selling homegirl who believes in romance, hip-hop and keeping things simple - that’s who Jill Scott is
Posted Apr 10, 2001 12:00 AM
The Mondrian is one of those ultrafabulous, crazy-expensive, postmodern Los Angeles hotels where an encyclopedia of celebrities mingles nightly at the SkyBar. It’s Saturday, and three down-to-earth black women are asking for a table.”I’m sorry,” the hostess says flatly. “We have no tables right . . . ” She stops midsentence and lays eyes on one of the women who has on a long black poncho over a wrinkled white button-down shirt and black leggings. She has on silver-on-white shell-toe Adidas with fat laces and no socks, and she carries a black Gucci handbag. She has bright, sparkling eyes, and her hair is pulled back into braids that are piled atop her head, except for one little lonely frizzy hanging out in the center of her forehead. She is a woman of size who carries it regally. She is an old soul with a baby face. She is . . .
“Ohmigod!” the hostess says, her face lighting up. “You’re Jill Scott!”
Now Scott would probably be sitting at a table this very minute if five minutes ago she’d walked up and said, “Hi, I’m Jill Scott.” But that’s just not Scott. She’s resolutely unpretentious and completely anti-floss. Her debut album, Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1, has sold more than a million copies, and yet the only ice she’s rocking is a nice-size engagement ring, nothing flashy, from her fiance, Lyzel Williams. She could stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but she’s still happy at the Embassy Suites. (”It’s never crowded, it’s all families in there, and they have free breakfast,” she says.) “She’s the most earnest person I know,” says Ahmir Thompson, drummer for Philadelphia hip-hop band the Roots, with whom Scott has toured and whose 1999 breakthrough single, “You Got Me,” was co-written by Scott. “What you see onstage, that’s not an act - she’s very sincere, she’s very gentle, and she smiles with her eyes. When she was on tour with us, it’d be five in the morning, and we’d all be grumpy and tired, but she’d still be greeting people with that soothing voice like Cartman’s mother.”
Right now, though, Scott doesn’t sound much like the mom of a South Park character. She sounds like someone who’s not overly impressed with anyone or anything, including herself. The Mondrian hostess has suddenly found an open table, but it’s too late. “Oh, Jill, whatever,” Scott grumbles to herself. Her two homegirls in tow, she heads for the door.
At age twenty-nine, Jill Scott is the premier female romantic voice of the neosoul era. She’s more down-home than her interplanetary friend Erykah, as strong and self-serious but not as self-righteous as Lauryn, as much a free-thinker as Macy but not quite as spacey. She’s a singer-songwriter with roots in soul music and poetry slams.
Who Is Jill Scott? swings with the pulse of Seventies soul and funk, is buoyant like Minnie Riperton, introspective like Roberta Flack. The album is filled with word pictures of childhood, street life and the invigorating upside of love. Driven by the single “A Long Walk” - in which Scott imagines a date with someone whose background “ain’t squeaky clean” but who’ll discuss the Bible, eat passion fruit, cry to the blues and be silent with her - it’s reached Number eighteen, making Scott popular without being particularly pop.
Scott has won fans from all corners of the world. “Is that one sexy CD or what?!” asks Melissa Etheridge. “It’s hip-hop, but it’s poetry and it’s R&B and jazz. She’s the real thing.” Adds Miami rapper Trick Daddy, “When I first heard her, it was like God was talking to me through her. Jill is my girl. If she ever wanna do a song with a thug, I’m her thug.” “That’s my friend,” says Erykah Badu, who saw Scott sing in L.A. a few months back, the first show she’s seen as a non-performer in two years. “She’s real sympathetic about humanity and the way that people treat other people. And her music takes me back to the grass roots. It’s simple, whimsical, very dreamy. She sounds more like a horn than a singer. She makes me cry. She makes me feel me.”
Scott grew up in a North Philly ghetto with her mom, Joyce Scott, and her grandmother Blue Babe. “She was a very loved child,” her mother says. “Her food was given to her with love. She never had a diaper rash. This baby knew that she was loved.” Scott was talking by eight months and reading at four years old. “She would read stories to my friends and act out the characters,” Joyce says. “She learned at a very early age to be the center of attraction and accept it. Once, a principal told me, ‘Jill is a little butterfly and the other kids are flies.’ I was insulted by his wording but at the same time he, too, knew that she was different.” Joyce married a man who was not Jill’s father and who turned out to be physically abusive. One night, Joyce wrapped four-year-old Jill in a blanket and ran to her mother’s house, leaving everything else behind. Jill’s grandmother, “a very Mahalia Jackson-ish singer,” became one of her best friends. They slept in the same bed until Jill was eighteen, and whenever Jill goes home she’s back in her grandmother’s bed. Mom was a jack-of-all-trades who worked as a dental technician, then ran a day-care center, then refurbished antiques. “My mother is a nice lady, but don’t talk to her any old way,” Jill says. “You could really get hurt. I’m the same way. There are limits. You’re not gon’ talk to me any old way, ’cause I’m a lady.”
Scott spent three years at Philadelphia’s Temple University studying secondary education, with plans to become a high school English teacher. When they put her in front of kids, she started teaching them to spell by making little songs out of the words: “That’s the way that I learned how to spell. I made a melody out of the words. The students were feelin’ it.” But the teachers were not. “They said, ‘Oh, to be young and idealistic.’” So she quit. Quit school and her job, both on the same day. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m-a do, I don’t know where I’m-a go.’ But by the time I got home the phone was ringin’.”
A friend offered her an apprenticeship in theater that would teach her every part of the theatrical world. Her twelve-month, six-day-a-week, fourteen-hour-a-day stint paid $150 a week: “One minute we’d be in the basement diggin’ holes, tryin’ to build a new theater, and an hour later, I’d have on a dress, welcoming the people into the theater company, filthy!” That led to acting jobs, including a spot in the Canadian cast of Rent, poetry readings and a place in the tightknit Philly artist community, which included friends such as Jazzy Jeff of Fresh Prince fame and Thompson.
In the summer of ‘99, Jeff gave Scott a few tracks, and in three days she wrote a few songs. “We rode down to the waterfront, and I parked, and she was like, ‘Don’t look at me.’ And we sat there, and she sang ‘A Long Walk,’” says Jeff. “And I sat there captivated like a little kid. I drove her straight to the studio, and we cut it. What a lot of people don’t believe is that was the first song Jill ever did, and what you hear is the original first vocals that Jill ever cut.”
A few months later, after she left for Canada, Jeff burned 100 CDs and gave them to friends in the industry. Scott had given him only one rule: He could not send out her picture. She wanted people to respond on the strength of the music: “I’m not interested in being commodified. I’m not into being sold. I’m not a slave.” When she returned to Philly, one record exec, Steve McKeever of the fledgling label Hidden Beach, was not asking to see a picture. He wanted to see her. “I looked at his shoes. I knew this man was a rich man. I knew that he probably had a multimillion-dollar house out there somewhere, but he had on runned-over shoes. His shoes were slanted in the back, like he had really been wearing those shoes. And I was like, ‘He don’t give a damn, he likes his shoes.’ And from that moment when I saw his shoes, I was like, ‘that’s him.’ ”
She made fifty-two songs. “I liked them all,” she says. “The ones that I loved were the ones that I placed on the album, because at the end of the day, if nobody bought it, I would want to be able to play it and listen to it and enjoy it.” The album is romantic soul music cool enough for the hip-hop generation and mature enough for our mothers. “Jill’s voice captivates you in a way that you can hear Jill smiling while she’s singin’,” Jeff says. “Her personality comes out on records, and especially in today’s music, that’s really hard to get out. You listen to Jill’s record and you know Jill.” She’s a real singer, with soul and range, and she’s also a writer. You can hear her spoken-word-poetry roots in her lyrics, her wordplay, her details. And, rare among modern albums, Who Is Jill Scott? displays a deep faith in the power of love. In an era where songs about breakups, such as OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson” and Badu’s “Green Eyes,” are common, Scott has delivered an album filled with songs testifying that love can work and does matter. While Sade has filed yet another album in which her heart is broken at nearly every turn, Scott, significantly, has made an album about love without a single song about heartbreak. The album’s key line may come at the end of “A Long Walk,” when - after celebrating the spark of a relationship that’s as verbal as it is sexual, as religious as it is romantic - she lays open the possibilities of love: “Maybe we can save the nation. Come on!”
It’s a Sunday afternoon, so rainy that there’s flooding in parts of Los Angeles. Scott’s digging through the stacks at the Studio Warehouse Department, a vintage-clothing store with ten-dollar coats and four-dollar dresses that feels like someone’s old, dank attic. There are tremendous things that are not for sale: a Frank Sinatra doll, a Fab Four-era Beatles lunchbox, a Big Boy doll with a bobbing head, a three-foot-tall Yosemite Sam with guns blazing, a four-foot-tall Daffy Duck, a Farrah Fawcett coffee mug, a collection of mint-condition Barbies. The place is kind of hip, but we’re still pretty far from the Mondrian. Scott’s friends say that there are no breakup ballads on Who Is Jill Scott? because during recording she was completely in love, moving from having a boyfriend to having a fiance. She is still very much in love. At one of her poetry readings in Philly about eight years ago, she saw a man sitting in the middle of the aisle and just couldn’t take her eyes off him. “The first time Lyzel saw me,” she says, “he just looked at me and said, ‘God, if you give me this woman, I swear I will never do her wrong.’” For years they were just friends. She says he never lied and was as genuine as any man she’d ever known. And then, at some point two or three years ago - she doesn’t remember exactly when - they started dating. “All of a sudden, we were holding hands,” she says. “Then it got to a point where I couldn’t deal with a day with not talking to him. And next thing I knew, we were kissing on the lips. And it was nice.” Williams is a DJ by night and a graphic artist by day. He designed her album cover and the art inside the booklet.
Unlike so many modern celebrities, Scott is not having a public broom-jumping. Asked when they’re getting married, she just says, “Sometime soon. Real soon.” It’s not a publicity thing. It’s love. Is she excited to be married? “Very excited - to be married to him. Just to be married for the sake of being married is, whatever. But to him, yes!”
Does she have a dress?
“I may not wear a dress. I may not have clothes on. I don’t care how we do this. I’m just happy that it’s him, and it’s us.” It’s love.
Now don’t think Jill Scott is so disciplined and humble that she doesn’t catch herself falling into that Mondrian mind-set sometimes. It’s pretty easy to do when you’re a platinum recording artist, and people are coming up to you on the street and speaking in reverential tones all the time. The difference is that when she starts slipping, she catches herself: “I say, hold on, sister. Just as easily as it’s here, it can all be taken away, and if it is, it’s OK. I can go back to the poetry houses. I can go back to gettin’ paid fifteen dollars. I’d be all right. I’m hittin’ the thrift store right now.” She picks up a five-dollar lime-green coat with an orange lining. “My favorite quote of my own is this: ‘Positivity and peace is not a bus stop you get off at. You gon’ have to work on it every day for the rest of your life.’ ‘Cause the crap seeps in. I don’t care about how grounded you are - it seeps in. But I’m hustlin’ to keep my feet on the ground.”
TOURE
