As a girl growing up in Detroit, the jazz singer Sheila Jordan, who has died aged 96, heard a Charlie Parker record on a jukebox and knew then that his jazz pathway was one that she wanted to follow.
“Four notes! I heard Bird [Parker] and he’s been my hero ever since,” she said. Indeed she later married Duke Jordan, then a pianist with Parker, immersing herself in African American bebop culture and remaining true to her first inspiration throughout a long if uneven vocal career.
Not quite Piaf-size but certainly diminutive, Jordan overcame many obstacles: a small if expressive voice, racial bigotry, a troubled marriage, her own alcohol and cocaine abuse, and the need to provide for her daughter Tracey, born in 1955, once Duke, a heroin addict, had walked out. “He left but I kept my daughter,” she said.
There was also the realisation that her unorthodox vocal style was an acquired taste. Nevertheless, she found wide-ranging acceptance in Europe. She was made a National Endowment for the Arts jazz master in 2012 at the age of 84, and her discography burgeoned in the latter half of her career, as did her teaching assignments in the US and overseas.
According to the New York Times, she was born Sheila Jeanette Dawson in Detroit, the daughter of Margaret (nee Hull) and Donald Dawson, then both 21 years old and working for General Motors. However, in an interview with Sally Placksin, author of the book Jazzwomen, Jordan stated that her mother was only 16 at the time of her birth and married Jordan’s father the same night.
What is not in dispute is her father’s almost immediate disappearance from her life, and her mother gradually losing herself to alcohol. The three-year-old Sheila was sent to live with her maternal grandparents, Walter and Irene Hull, in Summerhill, Pennsylvania, a dirt-poor hamlet in coal-mining country. They too were alcoholics: “It was a struggle just living; we ate whatever my grandfather, who was part-Native American, caught when he went hunting – deer, squirrel, porcupine,” she told the writer Leonard Feather.
Given these straitened circumstances, the child’s only consolation was to sing, which she did assiduously, on the radio, in church or at school. Reclaimed by her mother, she moved back to Detroit in 1942, and fell in with jazz-minded friends. Hearing Parker’s Now’s the Time in 1945 sealed her fate: with two other Bird “fanatics”, she formed a vocal trio, Skeeter, Mitch and Jean, with Skeeter Spight and Leroi Mitchell, which specialised in putting words to Parker’s recorded solos. Parker came through Detroit to perform, but Sheila and her friends were too young to enter the club so he left a rear door open to allow them to hear the music. The first time she sat in with him and sang, he told her she had “million-dollar ears”, paying tribute to the accuracy of her pitch.
Constantly hassled by Detroit’s police in this racially tense city and frequently hauled into the cells for consorting with black friends, Sheila left the trio and in 1950 made for New York, working as a secretary by day and picking up singing gigs as “Jeannie Dawson” by night; Charles Mingus suggested she study music with the innovative pianist and thinker Lennie Tristano.
Sheila married Duke Jordan in 1952, but they performed together only occasionally. The British bassist Peter Ind, then working in New York, recalled “their rented loft at West 18th Street, where they often had all-night jam sessions”. All too soon, though, Duke was gone (the couple divorced in 1962) and she continued balancing typing jobs with club gigs, until in 1958, her regular spots at Page Three in Greenwich Village began to attract critical attention, not least from the influential composer-pianist George Russell, who included her on his album The Outer View, recorded in 1962.
Russell then recommended her to Blue Note Records and her debut album, Portrait of Sheila, the first on the label by a singer, recorded with just guitar, bass and drums, appeared a year later, earning rave reviews, and winning her the 1963 DownBeat Critics Poll and their Talent Deserving Wider Recognition category a further nine times.
After appearing with Russell’s sextet at the Newport jazz festival in 1964, she made brief trips to Europe, also touring with the radical trombonist Roswell Rudd and working regularly with the pianist Steve Kuhn, and increasingly often with the bassists Harvie S or Cameron Brown.
The advertising agency job she had held since 1966 came to an end in 1987: laid off with a year’s severance pay, she “figured it was time to sing full-time”. This she did, working constantly, often in Europe, and building an extensive portfolio of recordings – the latest, Portrait, was released this year.
Jordan lived to improvise, taking chances, often interpolating instant spoken narratives into her performances, or scatting, before moving on to a ballad, the emotion laden with what she called “the pain of life”. Frequently in the UK, she appeared at Ronnie Scott’s with the pianist Brian Kellock in 2006, having played earlier at the club in 2001 with the pianist Nick Weldon, among many other local appearances.
A biography, Jazz Child – A Portrait of Sheila Jordan, by Ellen Johnson, was published in 2014.
Consistently creative and game to the end, she was tended in her final illness by Tracey, a music publicist, who survives her, as does a half-sister, Jaquelynn.