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Sheila Jordan, fearless vocal improviser, is dead at 96

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. Advertisement 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 Blue Note -- which by policy had never before recorded a singer -- heralded an important new voice in jazz. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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 were as varied as the vocal inflections that she brought to her interpretations of a song. A primary contributor was an acknowledged lack of self-confidence. Of equal significance was her decision to focus on raising her only child as a single mother, restricting her club work. Instead, she took a secretarial job at a New York advertising agency and held it for 25 years. Advertisement Ms. Jordan also struggled with alcoholism and later with cocaine addiction before entering a recovery program and overcoming both. She was an inveterate chance taker as a singer, but her performances were rarely just exhibitions of virtuosity. She loved to toy with tempos, spinning out long vocal lines seemingly without effort, and deploying a vibrant vibrato eloquently. 'I sang since I was 3 years old,' she told the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program. She added: 'I was always scared. I was so unhappy. And the only thing that saved me was the music.' Sheila Jeanette Dawson was born Nov. 18, 1928, in Detroit to Donald and Margaret (Hull) Dawson, both 21-year-old factory workers for General Motors. Her father was with her mother when she gave birth, along with a local doctor, in a room furnished with a Murphy bed. He then pretty much disappeared. He later remarried and fathered five more children, whom Ms. Jordan would get to know in later years. Within months, her mother abandoned motherhood in favor of alcohol and a cycle of unhappy relationships. She sent her infant daughter to live with her maternal grandparents, Walter and Irene Hull, who raised her alongside their nine children in Summerhill, Pa., a coal town in the Allegheny Mountains. Sheila grew up ridiculed by local children for her family's poverty. 'We had an outhouse and no water in the house,' she noted in the oral history. She was called a 'half-breed.' ('I have Native American on my grandfather's side,' she said.) Advertisement In 1942, at 14, she was reclaimed by her mother -- rescued, essentially, from her grandparents' own alcoholic abusiveness. The improvement in relative safety was nominal; Ms. Jordan recalled being molested by at least one of her 'stepfathers,' as she called them, while her mother was passed out. Still, the return to Detroit resulted in a life-altering introduction during her sophomore year of high school to the music of saxophonist and modern jazz pioneer Charlie Parker, known to his fans as Bird. 'I always sang but I didn't know what kind of music I wanted to sing,' she told Ellen Johnson, the author of 'Jazz Child: A Portrait of Sheila Jordan' (2014). 'Until that unforgettable day I went to the hamburger joint across the street from my high school.' Looking through the selection of songs on the jukebox, she chose 'Now's the Time' by Charlie Parker and His Reboppers. 'After the first four notes I was hooked,' she said. 'I got goose bumps, and I instantly knew that was the music I had been waiting to hear and would dedicate my life to singing.' Detroit in the 1940s had a thriving jazz scene. Ms. Jordan plunged in and became a major participant under the name Jeannie Dawson. She discovered she had a rare ability to learn Parker's wildly intricate solos off his records and sing them. She even set her own lyrics to some. In time, Parker, who came to play in Detroit regularly, met Ms. Jordan, who was too young to get into clubs but who listened to him devotedly from the backdoor alley. Advertisement 'I sang one of Bird's songs and he said to me, 'You have million-dollar ears, kid,'' she recalled. 'I didn't even know what that meant.' Jeannie Dawson slowly built a career for herself around Detroit as a jazz singer while maintaining a parallel supporting career as a typist. In 1951, she moved to New York City, 'I just needed to get out of Detroit,' she was quoted as saying in 'Jazz Child.' 'I couldn't take the racial prejudice, and I thought New York would be better.' She joined the typing pool at the Madison Avenue ad agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample while singing at night at jam sessions in jazz clubs. She also began studying with pianist and composer Lennie Tristano, one of the great progressive thinkers and teachers in jazz, whose support helped build her confidence. In 1953, she married Duke Jordan, the pianist in Parker's original quartet, whom she had begun seeing in Detroit. Like Parker, her new husband was addicted to heroin. The marriage was a disaster, with Duke Jordan almost entirely absent, even for the birth of their daughter, Tracey, in 1955. The couple divorced in 1962. In addition to her daughter, Sheila Jordan leaves her half sister, Jacquelynn Ann Dawson-Tailford. Ms. Jordan's life revolved around her baby, supported by a new day job at the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, which would sustain her for the next quarter-century. Still, she managed to find a singing spot one night a week at Page Three, a Greenwich Village nightspot with a predominantly lesbian clientele and a rotating cast of colorful performers and up-and-coming accompanists, including jazz pianists Dave Frishberg, Herbie Nichols, and Cecil Taylor. Advertisement At the Page Three, Ms. Jordan encountered young bassist Steve Swallow, who acquiesced in her desire to experiment with bass-and-voice duets -- a rare combination that Ms. Jordan virtually invented in jazz and would pursue to acclaim for the rest of her career. Ms. Jordan was also discovered by George Russell, an experimental jazz theorist, who brought her into a recording studio for her first time to sing his avant-garde rearrangement of one of the first songs she had learned as a child, the coal-miner ballad 'You Are My Sunshine,' for his 1962 album, 'The Outer View.' Her stark, nearly a cappella rendition stopped traffic in the jazz community and got her a date with Blue Note. In 1975, with her daughter in college, Ms. Jordan finally returned to a recording studio to make 'Confirmation' for Japanese label East Wind. Thereafter, she never stopped recording -- more than two dozen albums as leader or co-leader, including 'Sheila Jordan Live at Mezzrow,' released when she was 92, and 'Portrait Now,' released this year. In 1977, Ms. Jordan was invited to sing at an afternoon concert at the City College of New York in Manhattan. The concert, and the talk-back that followed, evolved into collegiate jazz programs at CCNY, one of the first programs of its kind in the United States. A groundbreaking parallel career as a jazz educator and vocal mentor ensued, with Ms. Jordan exerting a rousing influence on new generations of young female singers. Her methodology, as recorded in her biography, remained elemental. 'I just want to keep this music alive by inspiring others to love it as much as I do,' she said. Advertisement This article originally appeared in