Jazz Condition -- UPI Arts & Entertainment

Three men, three different instruments, music of poetic beauty -- and lives often overshadowed by tragedy.

Recent months have brought forth three very different biographies. They document with varying degrees of success the lives of trumpeter Chet Baker and tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, both of whom have left this world, and singer Jimmy Scott, who enjoys a splendid career revival after decades of humiliation, misunderstanding -- and obscurity.

Since he's still with us, and performing vocal jazz as high art, let's start with Scott.

The singer, initially known as Little Jimmy Scott, is profiled with great appreciation and understanding in biographer David Ritz's thorough "Faith in Time, The Life of Jimmy Scott."

He has endured, even triumphed over adversity his entire life. He has been called by The New York Times Magazine "perhaps the most unjustly ignored American singer of the 20th century."

Madonna, Lou Reed, Nancy Wilson and the late Marvin Gaye at various times called him their favorite or most influential singer. Scott's one bona fide hit, "Everybody's Somebody's Fool," was recorded in 1950.

Many thought he was dead until he sang at Doc Pomus's funeral in 1991. A string of critically acclaimed CDs has followed.

Scott's behind-the-beat voice oozes poignancy and heartbreak. And the latter is something he knows full well, and candidly shares with the public through Ritz's probing interviews.

Scott was one of 10 children in a family in Cleveland. His mother was killed in a tragic accident when he was 14. Scott and his siblings were parceled out to a series of foster homes.

He was diagnosed with Kallman's Syndrome, a hereditary hormonal deficiency that stunted his growth and kept him from reaching puberty. That led to decades of everyday misunderstandings from those who thought he was either a woman in man's dress or gay, neither of which was the case. From Scott, his four ex-wives, fellow musicians, producers, industry executives and siblings, Ritz has revealed the full Scott story, including his pain, his alcoholism and his difficulties with the recording industry, his years in obscurity -- a middle-aged man working as a hotel shipping clerk and elevator operator.

"I grew to see my affliction as my gift," Scott told him. "When I sang, I soared. I could soar higher than all those hurts aimed at my heart. As a singer, I've been criticized for sounding feminine. They say I don't belong in any category, male or female, pop or jazz. But early on, I saw my suffering as my salvation. All I needed was the courage to be me. That courage took a lifetime to develop."

As Ritz so poignantly observes, "To hear him speak of his heartbreak is so to lessen your own and give you hope that heartbreak, like everything else in life, is fleeting."

Backbeat Books is just out with the U.S. publication of British author Dave Gelly's new Getz biography, "Nobody Else But Me." It's a riveting look at a man who played perhaps the most beautiful ballads ever heard on tenor saxophone, but whose life was checkered with demons, including drug and alcohol abuse.

Getz first found acclaim within the jazz world as a key member of the "Four Brothers" reed section in Woody Herman's Thundering Herd in the 1940s. He received more general fame for popularizing the bossa nova music of Brazil's Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto in the United States.

In 1963, his "Jazz Samba" became the first -- and only -- true instrumental jazz album to top Billboard's pop chart.

Yet the sheer beauty of his music and distinctive tenor sax tone, was offset off the bandstand -- and sometimes onstage -- by his turbulent personality and sometimes destructive personal life. He died from cancer in June 1991.

"Getz did not allow the pain and fury of his personal life to guide and claim his music. Instead, he used his art to create his own catharsis, a refuge. Where there was chaos in life, he brought order and calmness, expressing it all through his beloved sax."

His music included occasional pairings with the trumpeter Chet Baker, even though the pair could barely tolerate each other. Getz, since the '50s, had considered Baker "a brat and a nuisance," according to Baker biographer James Gavin.

Baker's addled life is documented in Gavin's "Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker." That's an appropriate title for a work (published by Alfred A. Knopf) about a young man with a romantic tone both on horn and singing voice and matinee idol looks, who in just a few years was a heroin junkie who looked far older than his years.

He was content, it seemed, to perform $50 gigs and record for enough money to score his next "fix."

He crisscrossed Europe for decades, recording frequently and living his singular version of the high life. It ended abruptly and in mystery on May 12, 1988, or early on Friday the 13th, when he jumped, fell or was pushed from his hotel room window the night of a scheduled concert in Amsterdam, Holland. The body wasn't identified until the following day.

The book's research was painstaking; Gavin seemed compelled to share it all in this 430-page effort. There is far more detail about Baker's drug habit and sex life than most readers need to know and few would care to know.

It feels Baker is under the microscope fix by fix, documentary-style but we rarely get any insight or analysis from the author about the lifestyle Baker led -- or more importantly -- the music he made in spite or because of his personal demons.

It's a haunting tale of a man's demise, without enough balance from the music that at least initially inspired his great sound but became a means to an end. Fatally so.