Sheila Jordan, whose cool and supple voice carried her name through decades of jazz recordings, performance and education, died Monday in New York, her family confirms to Variety. No cause of death was cited; she was 96.
A virtuoso singer and improvisor who was often overlooked during her lifetime, at least partially due to an aversion to self-promotion, her 1963 debut album “Portrait of Sheila” in particular is widely regarded as a classic and she released more than two dozen albums over the course of her career, including “Portrait Now,” released earlier this year. She was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2012.
Born Sheila Jeanette Dawson in Detroit in 1928, by her own account, Jordan did not have an easy childhood.
“My mother was only 17 when she had me, and my father married her at that time to give me a name,” she told WBGO’s Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2023. “They didn’t stay together. So, she really couldn’t take care of me,” Jordan told. “My grandparents raised me until I was into high school in this small coal-mining town where they lived in Pennsylvania. It was very poor and there was a lot of alcoholism. But I got through by singing.”
Jordan became enamored with jazz after hearing Charlie Parker on a jukebox in high school. “I put my nickel in, and up came [Charlie “Bird” Parker], playing ‘Now is the Time,’ and I said that’s the music,” she told NPR. “That’s the one I’ll dedicate my life to.”
Jordan sought out performance opportunities as a teenager around Detroit, to which she’d returned at 14. She left the city to “go chase Bird,” as she described, in New York. She eventually befriended Parker — “He was very, very wonderful to me,” Jordan said of Parker — and she would later marry one of his close collaborators, Duke Jordan; they have a daughter together but divorced in 1962.
Jordan released “Portrait of Sheila,” in 1963, on Blue Note — she was the first vocalist to release an album on the storied jazz imprint. Although the album received critical raves, it would be more than a decade before the release of her follow-up, “Confirmation.” She later described being surprised by the praise her debut received, and said the extended gap between records was due to a reticence to ask for help.
She spent the following decades performing around the city with some of jazz’s best-known names – Parker, Charles Mingus, Herbie Nichols and Parker among them – while raising her daughter as a single mother and working during the day at an advertising agency for 25 years. Once her daughter was in college, however, her career gained momentum and she began releasing albums at a steady clip in the late 1970s and continued performing into recent months. Her latest album, “Portrait Now,” was released earlier this year; over the years she also appeared as a featured vocalist on albums by Carla Bley, Cameron Brown, George Gruntz, Bob Moses and Roswell Rudd, among others, and taught jazz vocal workshops at the City College of New York and other institutions.
She is survived by her daughter, Tracey J. Jordan, a veteran music executive at Motown and Arista Records, SiriusXM, MTV and currently DePasse-Jones Entertainment.
“I’ve always said, ‘support the music until it can support you,’” Jordan told Jazz at Lincoln Center.
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