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.