Jill Scott

Jill Scott was a poet before she was a singer, and the record keeps that order, which is the right way round: Who Is Jill Scott? is an album that works because the words came first.

She was born in Philadelphia on 4 April 1972 with not one planet in water and not one in a fixed sign. Those two absences are the chart. No water means nothing in it broods or absorbs; no fixed signs means nothing in it digs in. Five planets sit in air and four in fire, so the whole arrangement thinks, says and moves, and has no mechanism at all for staying still or taking something personally in silence. For a performer whose register is warmth, that is a genuinely surprising reading, and it suggests the warmth is articulated rather than simply felt.

Venus, Mars and Saturn group together in Gemini inside under five degrees, which is a very tight cluster in the sign of the exchange and the double meaning. Taste, drive and discipline fused in the sign of language is about as close as a chart comes to describing a working poet.

Mercury squares Jupiter twelve minutes of arc from exact, which is scale outrunning accuracy: the statement made larger than the evidence, delivered with complete confidence. In a spoken word performer that is not a fault, it is the form. Mars faces Neptune across the chart half a degree off, drive against the thing that keeps moving, which is effort aimed at atmosphere rather than at a target.

Two decades of records that are more spoken than sung are what a chart with five planets in air and none in water produces when it is handed a microphone: the feeling arrives as language or it does not arrive at all. The poetry was never a phase she grew out of; it is the mechanism.