Jazz vocalist Cindy Scott has always had music in her life. The daughter of a classical pianist and a band director, she was a dedicated flute player until college, when she had the required pick-a-major crisis. She bounced from music to pre-medical and finally business, detouring to spend her junior year in Germany.
“We used to hang out in this bar (in Germany),” Scott says. “Sometimes the owner would lock the doors, and they would pass this boot of beer around the table. We were all drinking for hours, and there was a piano player at the table, and after many of the boots had gone around, he got up and started playing. I knew all the words, so the owners, in their drunkenness, gave me a gig.” It was her first gig, and she made 25 dollars. “Then we passed the hat and got another 25 bucks each, and that’s it, I was hooked.”
Despite this a-ha moment, she went on to work in management for several years. “I had kind of a big job with a lot of people reporting to me and a corner office and all that stuff, but when I could, I would sing on the side.”
At a jazz workshop, she was reading What Color is Your Parachute? “(It’s) sort of a career search thing, and I was trying to do the exercises, which are really a bitch, man. They ask over and over again, ‘What do you do better than most people?’ and ‘What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about money?’” She called her husband, and told him she wanted to go back to music. “And my husband says, ‘Honey, I’ve been trying to tell you that for 10 years.’”
The couple won a house on a reality television show, and that’s when Scott quit her day job to take up jazz full-time. She’s made two albums since.
“I wanted this record to really reflect how my music has changed since I moved here,” she says of her 2009 release, Let the Devil Take Tomorrow. “I feel it does really reflect a lot of New Orleans stuff, even though it’s not a typically New Orleans record. But it’s me. It’s kind of where I am.”
