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Billed as ‘the greatest voice you’ve never heard’, Jackie Paris was a New Jersey-born jazz balladeer who achieved fleeting success in the mid-’50s croon boom before sinking into an obscurity so deep that one ‘Who’s Who’ listed him as deceased. Writer-director Raymond De Felitta, captivated by Paris’s sonorous Bennett-meets-Baker stylings, decided to track down the man and find out where he’d been hiding for the past four decades.
The film begins as a fairly standard bio-doc, as De Felitta sets about exploring the brief ups and precipitous downs of Paris’s career. It’s a fascinating tale that reveals as much about the cutthroat nature of the music biz as it does about this witty, nostalgia-prone elder statesman. But as the director digs deeper, his horizons widen until ‘’Tis Autumn…’ becomes a frank and moving treatise on lost love, wasted chances and the pitfalls of monstrous egoism.