“Different Pulses”.
When Bob Boilen played the title track from Asaf Avidan’s 2012 album Different Pulses on NPR’s All Songs Considered (reviewed earlier here) a few weeks ago, you could hear the sound of various jaws hitting the floor. That’s because the voice of this latter day Janis Joplin belongs in fact to a 33 year old Israeli man.
Unlike poor old Jimmy Scott though, there’s nothing unfortunate about the sound that he produces. It’s just very unusual.
Little Jimmy Scott, as he was dubbed, was born with Kallmann’s Syndrome. This meant that he grew to be no taller than four foot eleven until he was into his late thirties, when he suddenly spouted another 8 inches. The result was that the diminutive Scott sounded for all the world like a female jazz singer.
Little Jimmy Scott, with fans Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie and Antony Hegarty.
And sure enough, he was right royally screwed by most of the people he seems to have met in the music industry throughout the 50s and 60s. Thoroughly dejected and unfairly ignored, he retired in the 70s.
Happily though, he was rescued again in the 1990s by the archetypal outsiders Lou Reed and David Lynch, who provided him with a belated renaissance. Reed invited him to perform on his 1992 album Magic and Loss, which was dedicated to their mutual friend Doc Pomus. And Lynch brought him in to work on the second series of Twin Peaks, which you can hear here.
Avidan in contrast seems to be a perfectly conventional man physically speaking. Which makes the sound he produces all the more remarkable.
Avidan began touring his native Israel with his band in 2006, and over the next four or five years they produced 3 hugely successful albums, where they quickly amassed a sizable cult following. They went their separate ways in 2011 though, and Different Pulses is his debut solo album.
If Jimmy Scott had had Janis Joplin’s oomph, and she his vocal range, this is what it might have sounded like. Impressively, it’s a range and emotional depth that’s maintained across the whole album.
Asaf Avidan.
There’s very little sense however of the East or of the Orient. There is occasionally a slight hint of the few years Avidan spent on Jamaica soaking up their rhythms. But for the most part it’s a richly sophisticated RnB album that would 40 years ago have been put out by Stax and distributed by Atlantic Records. Doc Pomus would been called in to provide a lyric or two. And Jimmy Scott could easily have been smuggled in to provide backing vocals. Un-credited of course.
You can see the video for Different Pulses and hear Avidan for yourself here.
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