Sheila Jordan, Fearless Vocal Improviser, Is Dead at 96

New York Times

2 days ago

Sheila Jordan, who never achieved the name recognition of a Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughan but came to be recognized as one of the great singers in jazz, died on Monday in New York City. She was 96.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Tracey Jordan.
A daredevil improviser with a lyrical voice that was extraordinarily responsive to her instinctive imagination, Ms. Jordan always seemed to be singing first for her fellow musicians. Her taste was regarded as impeccable, and she did not pander. Because of this, and also because of career-narrowing choices she made in her private life, she remained little known to the general public. Yet she never stopped singing, and those audiences that did hear her tended to adore her.
Named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2012 at the age of 84, Ms. Jordan continued to expand her global fan base right up to her death.
A jazz insider from her teenage years, she seemed to have known both the giants and the sidemen in that world, although she recorded with only a comparative few. Her first album under her own name, 'Portrait of Sheila,' arrived relatively late in her career, in 1963, when she was 34, but its release on the Rolls-Royce of jazz record labels, Blue Note — which had never before recorded a singer, by policy — heralded an important new voice in jazz.
Reviewers were rapturous. Billboard magazine awarded the album its four-star rating for having 'sufficient commercial potential' to 'merit being stocked by most dealers.' Ms. Jordan, however, would not make another record of her own for more than a dozen years.
The reasons for this were as varied as the vocal inflections that Ms. Jordan brought to her interpretations of a song. A primary contributor was an acknowledged lack of self-confidence. Of equal significance was her decision, as a single mother, to focus on raising her only child, restricting her club work. Instead, she took a secretarial job at a New York advertising agency that she held for 25 years.
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