Sad, violent, obscure saga of jazz singer Jackie Paris

Stumbling upon a talent as imposing, magnetic, and seemingly unflawed as that of Jackie Paris prompts both exhilaration and unease.

A jazz singer whose career spanned the 1940s through the '70s, Paris seems to have been everywhere and nowhere - singing with jazz greats such as Charlie Parker, recording highly acclaimed albums, but constantly missing the career boat, often by a hair. He remained so obscure that he appeared, literally, to die before his time: One notable jazz dictionary says he died in 1977, though in fact he last performed in 2004, just before dying of cancer at 79.

Here's where the uneasiness begins: What heinous tale could lie behind his being so marginal for so long? Why would any music dictionary mistakenly kill him? An oversight? Or revenge?

Filmmaker Raymond De Felitta got to the bottom of the sad, violent, but musically riveting saga in a documentary titled 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris that has made the rounds of film festivals since 2006 and recently arrived on DVD, appropriately subtitled, "The greatest voice you never heard."

Explanations are neither typical nor simple: None of the usual 1950s career-killers - drugs, alcohol, and homosexuality - is responsible for such a lack of visibility that Paris can't even be called a cult figure, so few and dispersed are his admirers.

De Felitta discovered him in 1991 while listening to a Los Angeles radio station and had the same astonished reaction I had when I walked into Academy Records in New York somewhere around 2003 and first heard that distinctive, soft-sandpaper voice on the sound system. De Felitta discovered that Paris was held in high esteem by the greatest of the great - Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, etc. The Paris CD at Academy, a Japanese import, had the original album notes, but gave no information after 1953 - the year he was Down Beat magazine's best new male singer of the year, though the disc (issued by Time Records, a label I've never heard of) was in stereo and thus had to have been made well after that. One of Academy's staff had tracked him down by phone (supposedly in his native New Jersey, though he was said to live in Manhattan) and could only report, "He sounded nervous."

Talent of that density was bound to be. Though I've since downloaded Paris from Amazon.com and found one of his LPs sold on the sidewalks of New York, my favorite of his discs remains what I heard that first day, Jackie Paris Sings the Lyrics of Ira Gershwin, one of an estimated 10 or so solo albums. Reactions have been extreme: One enthralled neighbor listened to Paris outside my apartment door. A friend was so turned off by Paris that he punched the eject button on the car stereo.

Earlier Paris discs, such as Skylark, sound like the work of somebody perhaps too hungry for a hit, too eager to please, and all too willing to reveal only the most commercial fractions of himself, emphasizing his upper range, which was was boyish, bordering on androgynous. The Ira Gershwin disc, in contrast, swings hard, but not typically: Amid the usual saxophones, there are also cellos. Songs include several lesser-known numbers from the Broadway show Lady in the Dark.

Paris' distinctiveness is not easily summed up. Most of his contemporaries were part song stylist and part jazz singer, tending more toward one than the other. Paris, however, had the stylish elegance of Tony Bennett and the emotional insights of Judy Garland, but also the harmonic imagination of a seasoned jazz singer - perhaps not to the dizzying degree of Sarah Vaughan, but close. Unlike many, he wasn't soulful one minute, breezily improvising the next; he fused the two qualities that are so often mutually exclusive. Everything is rooted in the emotional conviction at his core.

In the film, Paris admirers also talk about his "subtle wickedness" and the sense of "knowledge" in the voice. The filmmaker describes Paris - whom he met only 12 weeks before his death - as weary of such praise, "as if being unique is a tired substitute for being popular."

But even in the film's concert portions, the 79-year-old Paris is remarkably intact. In interviews, he vividly recounts the jazz icons he sang with - along with indiscretions such as slapping a powerful club owner because the audience was too tiny. He was from a tight Italian family, married twice, but never had children (or so he said); we see a reunion with one ex-wife, singer Anne-Marie Moss.

Sprinkled throughout are his numerous near-misses. Recording contracts and even film possibilities - the square-jawed singer photographed just fine - strangely ended as they were about to begin. Tours with jazz greats that should have yielded recordings, but went undocumented. An extravagantly favorable letter of recommendation from comedian Lenny Bruce, written in the years before his drug and legal problems, was never mailed. One of Paris' better albums was jerked from retail stores because the cover - a beach scene with entwined couples - was too suggestive. Life always has a few bad breaks, but Paris' were so numerous that there had to be self-sabotage going on.

Slowly, the darkness within begins to emerge. Though he was the favorite son in his family, the dynamics became complicated and stormy when his younger brother devolved into a life of heroin addiction. Also, the family favor in which he stood seemed to have fed a galloping egotism that he expressed in increasingly inappropriate ways. Besides being autocratic, he was known to turn to his band in mid-performance and yell at them to "Burn!" - though doing so was too distracting to successfully raise the performance's temperature.

From the beginning, he was surrounded by attractive, interesting women. But woe to any man who even casually lighted the cigarette of one of them. One wife reports that after such an incident, the raging Paris tried for days to track the man down, to avenge what he considered a grievous slight.

One of the few visual records of Paris performances is from daytime TV - The Mike Douglas Show - often a haven for stars who had behaved badly in the industry's higher echelons. There's an account of a hugely successful week at New York's Tavern on the Green, but Paris was never re-engaged, apparently because his backstage behavior was such a turnoff.

Saddest of all is the family he claimed he never had. Paris, as it turns out, had a wife before the two others, and a son. De Felitta tracked them down and found them in an obscure mobile home park. Neither has done much in life, and Paris cut off virtually all contact after the woman left him, unable to take the jealousy and drama. Looking at these human husks, one is tempted to assume that the egomaniacal singer sucked the life out of them and left them forever empty - and for the sake of a career that not only didn't happen, but that also was scuttled in ways large and small by the man who so badly craved it. It's difficult viewing.

Squaring that with the exuberant Paris seen and heard singing becomes a case history in a compartmentalized artistic personality: Both sides are true. The problem with Paris is that they couldn't co-exist. One was always destroying the other.