"It's been a difficult night. I haven't slept yet," Jill Scott says quietly. "I got an e-mail from my lawyer - said, 'Congratulations! You are divorced.'"
Before the 2004 release of her second album, the Grammy-winning Beautifully Human, Scott was about to marry her "best friend," and she couldn't have been happier. Being married to the man who was also her manager, however, turned out to mean that she could never relax. The pressure became unbearable and she left. The remarkable thing is that despite the upheavals of the intervening period - of which divorce, it transpires, is only one - she is still glowing. "I think I'm definitely better for it," she says. "I'm angry, and a little wounded, but I feel my mojo and I like it."
Scott has certainly been keeping busy: her schedule this year has been dizzying. She finished recording her new album, The Real Thing, in February, then turned to acting, making her first major film, Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married? (a US box office No 1) between February and April. Meanwhile, she was auditioning as Mma Ramotswe, the lead in Anthony Minghella's film version of Alexander McCall Smith's bestselling novel, The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Then she went back to the album, auditioned again for Minghella, got the part, did some more recording and flew out to Botswana to film. In September, six days after she got back, the album was released. During this period - in fact, on the day Minghella flew from the UK to Scott's native Philadelphia to audition her - Scott's mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She is now completely cancer-free, something Scott says is "amazing."
PHOTO: AP
Scott's ability to inhabit completely whatever she's experiencing is part of what makes her special. She grew up in a less-than-wealthy neighborhood of north Philadelphia. "My background is not grim because of the love I received," she stresses. "We didn't have money, but anything that was free as far as arts were concerned, we were there. But yes, people were murdered all the time in my neighborhood, and a lot of the guys that I grew up with are gone, from homicide, or in jail. A lot of the girls I grew up with were pregnant by the time they were 16. I just was lucky."
Scott started as a poet - her latest collection, The Moments, The Minutes, The Hours, is a bestseller - and graduated through the performance poetry scene, through guest spots with fellow native Philly hip-hop innovators the Roots, to her own records. Anyone who fell in love with her 2001 debut, Who Is Jill Scott? - which features songs such as A Long Walk, a giddy litany of the joys of falling in love - will know that Scott's breadth of musical vision, range of vocal personalities and love of language sets her far above the glossy, brittle banality of some of her contemporaries. Her new songs have the same wit, precision and spirit. "I'm alive," Scott says, "and very happy about that. But a lot of this music has come from leaving [her marriage] and being celibate. So much of my ... " - she searches for the right word, imbuing her choice with maximum innuendo - "wanting came out on this particular project. You can call it horny if you want to." She grins. "Which is fair."
The characters in Scott's two films couldn't be more different. In Why Did I Get Married?, she plays a 127kg woman who remains in an emotionally abusive marriage because she believes it's God's will. "It was tough: I was angry with her for staying. Then having to wear a fat suit was hard, because people's reactions were so different. I'm not a small girl as it is, but then to add another 59kg ... "
To get used to the fat suit, she wore it out in public. "A lot of people would not look at me. There was a girl who had Golden [the lead single from Beautifully Human] as a ringtone. I said, 'I love your ringtone,' and she said, 'Thanks,' but she didn't even look at me. She saw the weight, the size, and didn't bother to even notice." By contrast, Mma Ramotswe is "who I'd like to be when I grow up, a beautiful, wonderful, powerful woman who has a grace about her. I loved playing her. Her first name is Precious! Come on! And I had to gain weight - I am the luckiest girl in Hollywood to be able to gain weight!"
Scott cherishes the fact that during her divorce she was able to spend time in Africa. "Ah! It was my first time. It was ... I don't know the word, honestly. Just being there helped me see how people are supposed to be, the level of dignity, of respect with which they treat each other, regardless of whether you live in a shack or a mansion. [Now] when I meet people I curtsey, because I did it for three months and it felt as normal as rain."
If there's any doubt left that Scott is more than equal to whatever comes her way, it's erased when she tells me an extraordinary story. At a recent string of shows at the House of Blues on LA's Sunset Boulevard, Scott was raw, funny, incendiary and brilliantly exhausting. After the last show, both Prince and Stevie Wonder came to her dressing room, and she and Prince - "the dancer of life!" - danced into the small hours. Then she was alone, "waiting outside for the valet to bring the car round, and these ... I say kids, but they must have been 25, looking wealthy, five-o'clock-in-the-morning wasted. And this guy's saying, 'Step back nigger, step back nigger.' He's saying it like it's a song, but there's nobody out there but me. I was taken aback, and I said, 'Excuse me?!' And he said, 'Shut your mouth and don't say a word when a white man is talking!'"
"I'm not kidding! I started laughing, and I followed him and his cohorts through the parking lot laughing hysterically, and they became more and more uncomfortable. It was one of the best moments of outrageous laughter I've had. To think for one moment I could possibly fit into that box. Do you understand what I just did tonight? I am so far from that word that it is funny. They looked so uncomfortable; I wanted to emasculate him, to make sure he was getting no nookie that night. The girls sobered up and were looking scared. It was something else - the first time in my life I've been called that. Wow. But I enjoyed it. You must fight back, it's imperative. I like the fight in me now."
The Real Thing: Words & Sounds Vol 3 is out now on Hidden Beach.
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