by Dick Edelstein
A message from Spotify on my phone this morning announced that jazz singer Sheila Jordan had just dropped a track from her forthcoming album. A musician of very long experience among the inner circle of bebop jazz stars—iconic players, most of whom are no longer with us—she is an iconic figure herself, still playing and recording regularly with outstanding musicians. You may wonder why she is not better known.
It’s complicated. Although few women have made a big reputation in jazz, we can think of several well-known vocalists who earned enduring reputations, such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday. Like Jordan, they all launched their careers in the mid-20th century. Perhaps because of extreme poverty in her early life and the need for a steady income after the birth of her daughter in 1955, Jordan kept her day job until she was nearly 60, combining her work in an advertising agency with her career as a singer, recording artist and teacher. In one interview, she makes the point that it was easier for her to sing what she wanted if she did not have to rely on her income as an artist.
In 1962, after a decade of intense involvement in the New York bebop scene, Jordan recorded her first album on the renowned Blue Note label, a great recording in the original version and the remastered 1995 release. She did not record again under her own name until 1977 but since then has recorded over thirty albums and has appeared as a featured vocalist on dozens more, working with distinguished musicians like saxophonist Archie Shepp, trumpeter Don Cherry, and avant-garde vocalist Carla Bley. Jordan’s close association with the avant-garde partly accounts for her relative obscurity since the audience for this sub-genre is pretty small in comparison to its artistic allure.
For over a decade, Jordan worked with avant-garde pianist Steve Kuhn, whose fluid and adventurous improvisations provide a perfect foil to her bebop-style vocals. Her performances sparkle with originality, a good antidote to the Trumpian ethos that demonizes anything its followers don’t understand. The avant-garde musicians exude a romanticism that could put pressure on the current trend towards stagnation in jazz innovation. These musicians believe in their own creative potential, independent of the need all artists have to sometimes play in particular styles if they want to make a decent living. But living icons like Sheila Jordan, Kenny Barron and Archie Shepp should not need to worry about making a living because the cultural role they play is invaluable. If they were a park, a mountain range, or even a tree or a bird, we would spend whatever were necessary to protect them as a part of our world cultural patrimony.
Most aficionados, when asked about the greatest jazz player of all time, would choose alto sax player Charlie Parker, undisputed star of the bebop era, or else tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, who dominated post-bop, but Louis Armstrong would surely win some votes, and deservedly so. Apart from his unerring ear for music, his superb musicianship and his infallible knack for improvisation, he schooled several generations of jazz musicians, and he has truly transcended his genre to become known to the entire world. Perhaps only Nina Simone and a few others have come close to Satchmo in terms of transcendence of their genre.
Sheila Jordan is different since she is known only to jazz fans, but she is an icon in that world who has had one of the most prolific careers of any living jazz musician. She has received eight music awards, and in 2024 was inducted into the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame. She currently gets around 13,000 monthly plays on Spotify, but there are many facets to Sheila Jordan as a person and an artist.
Jordan is one of the great vocalists associated with the bebop movement, having pioneered the use of scat singing and horn-like phrasing. When she heard the music of Charlie Parker’s Reboppers on a juke box she knew what she wanted to do in life and she first met her idol in Detroit in her mid-teens when he played in a local club. A few years later, when she moved to New York, she began an artistic collaboration and friendship with Bird that lasted till the end of his life.
Today she is one of the very few survivors of the bebop era, making her a distinguished ambassador in our time of a movement that eloquently embodied rebellion and independence and directly led to later jazz styles, including hard bop, post-bop, cool jazz, and free jazz. Even today we can still see the influence of bebop on contemporary music, especially on hip-hop, which has assimilated the trend toward musical innovations and cultural ethos that were such an important part of bebop styling.
Jordan was also the first jazz musician to fully embrace the voice-and-bass duo as a performance format, developing a style that treats the bass as an equal partner rather than a supporting instrument. Charlie Mingus first inspired her love for this format, later developed over decades working with legendary bass players like Harvie S and Steve Swallow. Her collaboration with Harvie S began in the late 1970s, when she heard him play in a New York club. Impressed by his playing, she introduced him to Steve Kuhn, who immediately hired him, and this was the start of a great collaboration that has stood the test of time. After touring together with the Steve Kuhn Quartet, Jordan and Harvie S began performing and recording together as a bass-and-voice duo.
This collaboration continues today because on Jordan’s new album entitled Portrait Now, due to drop this month, Harvie S accompanies Jordan, along with the guitar playing of Roni Ben-Hur. Despite her age Sheila Jordan continues teaching, writing songs, making recordings and traveling abroad to bring her highly personal version of jazz singing to audiences around the world, routinely playing mainstream gigs as well as avant-garde performances.
If you could see me now (Portrait of Sheila, Blue Note Records, 1963)