Sheila Jordan, the jazz vocalist who tugged at the boundaries of music whether she was scat-singing or freshly interpreting songs by Kurt Weill, Rodgers and Hart, or Jimmy Webb, died on Monday. She was 96. Jordan’s death was confirmed by her daughter Tracey Jordan, a music executive, who said her mother died in New York while listening to the bebop song “Bill for Bennie.”
Although not as widely known as peers like Betty Carter or Sarah Vaughan or later inheritors like Diana Krall, Norah Jones, or Cassandra Wilson, Jordan was a fearless, integrity-minded interpreter who took risks with her repertoire (sometimes singing only with bass accompaniment) and was one of the first vocalists signed to the legendary Blue Note Records.
To the detriment of her career, if not her art, Jordan never veered into pop crossover territory. The closest she came was a vocal spot on the 1972 jazz-rock concept album Escalator Over the Hill, where she appeared alongside Linda Ronstadt, Jack Bruce, guitarist John McLaughlin, and jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, among others. At the time, Rolling Stone said the album “leaves the listener enormously satisfied. . . a work that is complex, labyrinthine, but immediately enjoyable.”
Born Sheila Jeanette Dawson in Detroit on Nov. 18, 1928, Jordan had a life that she described in a 2022 interview as “hell.” Due to an alcoholic mother, Jordan was raised by her grandparents in a Pennsylvania coal town. When she returned to Detroit to live with her mother, she said her mother’s boyfriends would “come on to me.”
In Detroit, though, Jordan discovered her love of jazz by way of hearing and then meeting Charlie Parker, eventually singing there under the name Jeannie Dawson. (She was so skilled at an early stage that she could actually sing Parker’s improvisational melodies.) In the early Fifties, Jordan moved to New York and married Duke Jordan, a pianist in Parker’s band. Jordan herself began working as a typist for the first of two advertising agencies; in 2022, she said she thought of those jobs every time she watched an episode of Mad Men.
As luck would have it, one of those agencies needed a singer for commercials for watches and a refrigerator, an experience that led to one of Jordan’s friends suggesting she check out a new Greenwich Village club, the Page Three. A secretive venue that didn’t advertise, the Page Three was known to attract gay and cross-dressing crowds when none of that was accepted by society and sometimes the police. “It was a gay hangout,” Jordan said in 2022. “Men and women. But that didn’t bother me. I always accepted everyything and everybody for what they were. The gay women loved the way I sang. They supported me.”
At the club, Jordan met the likes of pianist Dave Frishberg and bassist Steve Sallow and began working out a repertoire and style that could be dark and sultry. “When I heard a song, I had to like the melody first,” she said in 2022. “Not so much the lyrics. If the lyrics were not good, I could change them. I had to be enticed by the melody of the song.” At another club, Cafe Bohemia, Jordan met and sing with Charles Mingus.
At the Page Three, Jordan met a quirky young singer named Tiny Tim. “People loved him because he was a character,” she said in this author’s 2024 book Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capitol. “He had long hair at the time and the guys were not wearing long hair, and I told him, ‘Tiny, do me a favor. Or do you a favor. Your hair is great, but when you’re riding the subway and leave this club, put your hair up under your hair, because if you don’t, you’re going to get attacked.’”
The Page Three closed not long after, but Jordan’s career continued, if sporadically. Still working at an ad agency so she could support her daughter, Jordan didn’t make her first album, Portrait of Sheila, until 1963. She didn’t record again until the Seventies, but starting then, word of Jordan’s reputation began to spread further, to Europe, where she developed a strong following. Jordan, who continued making albums well into her later life, said that she didn’t become a full-time singer until she was 61.
In the late Eighties, Jordan became sober after years of drug and alcohol problems, and she taught jazz vocal workshops and continued to perform well into her nineties. In the last few months of her life, a GoFundMe was set up to pay for her medical bills, and among the donors was former Late Night with David Letterman bandleader Paul Shaffer.
Asked in 2020 to give advice to young jazz singers, Jordan said, “Keep singing, don’t give up. Don’t let anything disappoint you or try to slay you away from what you want to do. I worked an office job, I typed … but I always found a place to sing my songs.”