Sheila Jordan (1928-2025)

Sheila Jordan, a jazz and scat vocalist whose passion for bebop and the friendship of Charlie Parker lasted for much of her professional life, transforming her into a heroic figure and mentor to a generation of younger singers, died on Aug. 11. She was 96. [Photo above of Sheila Jordan at a 52nd St. club in 1953, courtesy of Sheila Jordan]

Back in 2012, I interviewed Sheila in three parts. In tribute to her and her legacy, here are all three parts of our conversation combined:

Many jazz fans may be unfamiliar with Sheila's music and likely know little or nothing about her background. She was never a pop singer, and as a jazz vocalist, she didn't begin recording in earnest until 1962. Unlike many jazz singers, Sheila never was a coy stylist or an American Songbook warbler.

Instead, she was a hard-core bebop insider. Married for a time to pianist Duke Jordan in the early 1950s, she was a close friend of Charlie Parker, studied with pianist Lennie Tristano and hosted jam sessions at her loft in New York. Sheila sang at clubs until she met composer-arranger-pianist George Russell, who insisted she record just one song. More about that in the interview.

JazzWax: You were born in Detroit but grew up in Summerhill, Penn. Why?

Sheila Jordan: My mother was very young when she had me. She was barely 17. So she sent me off to Summerhill, in the coal-mining region, to live with my grandmother and grandfather. She’d come home from time to time, but mostly she remained back in Detroit.

JW: What was your mother like?

SJ: She had a serious drinking problem. I didn’t know my father well. If I saw him five times growing up, that was a lot.

JW: What was living with your grandparents like?

SJ: My grandfather was an alcoholic. He was a good man, a quiet man. But he was strict. My grandparents did their best. We went to church every Sunday, and I was raised as a Catholic. But the house was crowded. They already had six people living there. There were two desperately poor families in town, and we were one of them.

JW: What were living conditions like?

SJ: There were no lights or a toilet. Everything was outside the house. Sometimes my grandfather would pay the electric bill but most of the time the power was turned off by the electric company. It was awful, man. But you know what? It made me strong. I knew what the bottom felt like. Everything I got I worked for.

JW: Did you study piano?

SJ: I took a few piano lessons for free from my great-aunt in Pennsylvania. But Aunt Alma was strict and rough. I had tiny hands and they couldn’t reach all the keys. I wanted them to, but they were too small. When my hands couldn’t do what Aunt Alma asked, she’d whack my hands. After she hit me, I didn’t go back.

JW: Did you listen to music there?

SJ: Music was always a part of my life growing up. I listened to our radio—when my grandfather paid the electric bill. But mostly I listened to friends' radios. There was a radio show back then called Your Hit Parade, which featured the top songs of the week. I had this crazy ability to memorize those tunes immediately after hearing them just once and sang them pretty well. Soon I was singing on radio stations in nearby Johnstown and Altoona. The shows were these amateur-hour things that featured kids.

JW: Do you remember the first songs you sang?

SJ: Yes: My Ideal and He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings [laughs]. I also made up songs. I was often sent off to the store to buy stuff and had to pass a graveyard. That scared me, so I’d sing my head off as I passed it.

JW: How did you end up leaving your grandparents’ house?

SJ: One day my grandfather and grandmother were drinking with my mother. Naturally they got into a nasty fight, and my grandfather told my mother to get out “and take your kid with you." I was 14.

JW: Thinking back, how did that feel?

SJ: I felt so bad. I felt unwanted.

JW: When you arrived back in Detroit with your mother, what was her life like?

SJ: My mother was on her fourth husband at the time. In those days, you didn’t live with a guy. You had to marry him. She was always with creepy guys—gangsters and abusive people like that.

JW: Did your mother have additional children?

SJ: No, she didn't. She had had me so young that my aunts and uncles were my age or younger.

JW: In Detroit, you continued to sing?

SJ: Yes, I was always singing to myself. My mother had a rented apartment that came with a radio. She worked at General Motors on the assembly line and as a barmaid after her factory job, so I had lots of time to listen to music.

JW: Where did you go to school?

SJ: I went to Cass Tech in Detroit for a semester but then transferred to Commerce High School. I did this becauseI knew I'd have to find a job as soon as I graduated. Cass didn't offer typing classes and other secretarial courses, but Commerce did. During our lunch breaks at Commerce, we'd go across the street to a place that had a jukebox. I loved to listen to music, particularly Duke Ellington. I first got to hear Duke on a record that a kid next door had. My mother also had a record of Benny Goodman’s that I loved, too, but I've forgotten the name.

JW: What was your favorite record on that jukebox?

SJ: Charlie Parker and His Reboppers' Now's the Time. When I first saw the name of the group, I loved the sound of it. So I put my nickel in and played the song. After the first four notes, my hairs stood up. “Oh my god,” I said. I made the decision that day when I heard Bird to spend my life in jazz.

JW: When did you start putting lyrics to Parker’s songs?

SJ: After I heard Bird's records, I wanted to know where the music came from. I wanted to know if there were any people in Detroit playing it. I found out that Bird routinely came to Detroit.

JW: When did you first see Parker perform?

SJ: At the Club Sudan in Detroit. I went with a friend. The club didn’t serve alcohol so underage kids could get in. That’s where I heard Skeeter Spight and Leroy Mitchell sing. They were about my age. After they finished, I went up to them and said, “You guys were great. Can you teach me the words. I love Charlie Parker.” They invited me to rehearse and we became a group—Skeeter, Mitch and Jean, which was my middle name. I used it when I was young because kids teased me by calling me Sheba instead of Sheila.

JW: The Detroit scene was packed with bebop talent then.

SJ: Yes, it was. I met Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris and Kenny Burrell. They were the musicians I grew up with. I was crazy for jazz but couldn’t get into most of the clubs. I was just a teen. I remember trying to get into Club El Sino by changing my mother’s birth certificate and carrying a pack of Lucky Strikes. I also wore a pillbox hat with a veil.

JW: What happened?

SJ: I went up to the door but the doorman wouldn’t let me in. He said, “Go home kid and do your homework.”

JW: Did you?

SJ: Of course not. I went around to the alley with Skeeter and Mitch, who were with me. Bird somehow knew we were back there. He propped open the door, and we sat on garbage cans and listened. He must have told the owner not to close the door under any circumstances.

JW: Did you meet Parker that night?

SJ: Yes. When the set was over, Bird came out. We told him how much we loved his music. He was wonderful. We were adoring him, and we sang his Confirmation with our words that the guys had written.

JW: Sounds like you were creating lyrics for Parker’s tunes before Dave Lambert and King Pleasure or at least without hearing them.

SJ: Yes, but we weren’t nearly as polished, of course. And we were creating lyrics for the head chart, not Birds' solos.

JW: What did Parker think?

SJ: Oh man, he loved it. Every time he’d come to Detroit, he wanted to hear us sing. He once said to me, “Kid, you have million-dollar ears.” I sat in with him several times at the clubs and again years later. When I was with Skeeter and Mitch, I started out singing the head part. But they taught me how to improvise on songs and scat the solos. We were loving the music, and our group sat in any time musicians invited us to.

JW: As a white woman with black friends and a passion for black culture in the 1940s and '50s, did you face racial prejudice then?

SJ: Oh sure, all the time. After high school, I was going to all the black clubs and had to deal with a lot of racial prejudice by whites who didn't like what I was doing. Even in high school, the white principal made cracks.

JW: Like what?

SJ: She once said, “You dress so nice, why do you hang out with colored girls?” I said, “Oh, are they colored?” She said, “Yes,” sort of hissing the final “s.”

JW: What did you say?

SJ: I said, “I feel comfortable. They’re my friends.” I had had such a rough home life and a hard time in high school. I was always looked down on. The music lifted me up and the people who played it gave me purpose. Because of my background, I could relate to what they were going through.

JW: As a white woman frequenting black neighborhoods in Detroit, was the prejudice toward you particularly rough?

SJ: Oh sure, man. After I graduated from high school, I hung around all the black clubs and sat in when asked by musicians. When we finished at places like the Blue Bird Inn and Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, we’d pile into a car or cab to go home or go out. Cops would stop us all the time and ask where we were going.

JW: What did they say to you?

SJ: They’d say, “What are you doing with these two…” I can’t even say the word.

JW: What did you say in response?

SJ: I learned early that you had to sound a little naïve. Otherwise you could put yourself and everyone else in the car in danger. I’d say something like, “What? I can’t be with my brothers?” The word “brothers” wasn’t used like it is now. I was using it as though I was truly related to them, like we shared the same mother.

JW: What did the police say?

SJ: They’d seem perplexed and say, “Oh, go on, go on.” Essentially, I had to convince them I wasn’t white for it to be OK.

JW: Did you date black musicians?

SJ: Yes. I started going with tenor saxophonist Frank Foster in Detroit. We lived together until he went into the Army. I remember one time we were going on a picnic to Belle Isle park in the Detroit River with Jenny King, who was white and her boyfriend, who was black. The cops stopped us. They were plainclothes cops. I had thrown a cigarette from the window, and they crawled under the car to get it, thinking it was grass or something. Just another excuse to jam up an interracial couple.

JW: What happened?

SJ: They took us down to headquarters. They separated us and spoke to me alone. One cop said, “I want your mother’s phone number.” I told him I hadn’t lived with my mother since I was 17. I told him I was on my own.

JW: What did he say?

SJ: He said, “You see my gun? If I found my daughter with a—that word again—I’d blow her brains out.” You can’t even imagine what life was like back then without understanding the kind of blind hatred that existed for blacks by whites in certain cities, particularly among the police. There was racism and then there was this horrible fury that was reserved for interracial couples. It was horrible to experience.

JW: What did you say?

SJ: I told the cop I was moving to New York. He said sarcastically, “How cosmopolitan.” I shut up, and they let us all go. I heard later that they weren’t too rough with the guys. After that, Frank went into the Army during the Korean War, and I moved to New York in 1951.

JW: Where did you live in New York?

SJ: My best friend Jenny King and Virginia Cox, a Detroit artist, already had an apartment they were sharing in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan. A room there was vacant, and I took it. I came later because I was still with Frank Foster, before he left for the Army.

JW: What did you do for work?

SJ: I went to a temp agency and got a job as a typist at the Doyle Dane Bernbach ad agency. They liked my work in the research department, so I took a full-time job.

JW: So why did you move to New York?

SJ: To hear Bird. When I arrived, I went to see him right away at a club with my friend Jenny. I guess I was chasin’ the Bird [laughs]. When Bird saw me, he immediately said, “Oh you’re the kid with the million-dollar ears.” How he remembered is beyond me [laughs].

JW: Was Parker's Chasin’ the Bird written for you?

SJ: No. I don’t know how that rumor got started.

JW: When did you first meet pianist Duke Jordan?

SJ: Back in Detroit, when he came through town with Bird. I loved his piano playing. His invented song introductions were the most beautiful things I had ever heard. I would go and hear him, and eventually I got to know him. This was before I had met Frank Foster. Duke said, “If you ever come to New York, I’d be happy to see you.”

JW: When did the friendship turn romantic?

SJ: After I moved to New York. I started living with him in Brooklyn. Bird used to play these “cocktail sips,” which were formal Sunday afternoon parties that the black community threw. Bird would play with Duke on piano.

JW: Was there racial prejudice toward you by the black community?

SJ: Not at all. Everyone was wonderful to me. I was always accepted.

JW: Did you stay in Brooklyn?

SJ: After I had been with Duke for a while, I decided to move back into Manhattan. I got this loft on 26th St. and 8th Ave. and held jam sessions there. It was actually two lofts cut in half. My friend Virginia had the other half. Bird was at my loft all the time. He turned me on to Bartok. He’d bring records up to the loft. But he never came on to me. I was his little sister. I married Duke in 1953.   JW: Why would Bird come to your loft?

SJ: Just to visit or crash, or after fights with [his wife] Chan. Bird was so positive. He never talked about anything that was down or unhappy. The only time I heard him say something with disgust was when Duke was high [on heroin] and was nodding out. When he saw Duke in that condition, Bird scowled and said to him, “Man, didn’t you learn anything from me?” 

JW: In New York, did you encounter the same kind of racial prejudice that you had faced in Detroit?

SJ: Yes. One time I went out to get some Chinese food with two black artist friends. On our way back, coming around 26th St., four white guys jumped us.

JW: What happened?

SJ: The guys threw me down and started kicking me, knocking out a cap on one of my teeth. They had run out of a bar as soon as they saw me with my two black friends. Three of the white guys grabbed my two artist friends and held them while the fourth guy was kicking me. He was ready to kill me when a white detective got out of a car and came across the street with a gun pointed in my direction. He approached the guy beating me up and asked him what I was to him and did he know me. The guy who was beating me up said, “No." The detective ordered him to stop beating me and put them all up against the wall This plainclothesman saved my life. It infuriated those guys in the bar that I was with two black guys. People today think this stuff went on only in the South, but it also happened on 26th St. in New York. 

JW: In the 1950s, you studied with pianist Lennie Tristano?

SJ: Yes. Lennie gave me inspiration and an opportunity to try out vocal ideas. At the time, Lennie had a studio at 317 E. 32nd St. in Manhattan. I went to him because I was looking for a teacher. Max Roach, who I knew through Bird and Duke, had told me about him. Then Charles Mingus took me up to see him when Charles was playing a session there.

JW: What did you learn?

SJ: My first lesson was to learn Bird’s Now’s the Time. I told Lennie I already knew it. He said, “Great, go ahead and sing it.” I sang the song right off. Lennie said, “Well damn, you do know the song. What about Prez?” I told him I didn’t know any Lester Young solos.

JW: Was your marriage to pianist Duke Jordan a happy one?

SJ: No. We were in love—or I thought we were. The problem for us was that Duke was addicted to heroin, which wasn’t good for a marriage or anything else. He’d leave me and come back when he pleased. After my daughter Tracey was born, he didn’t come back at all, which was terrible. 

JW: Looking back, do you feel you should have tried to get Jordan to kick his drug habit?

SJ: Not at all. I didn’t feel as though it was my responsibility to police his habit. To be honest, I really detached. I had seen my share of addiction growing up and wanted to pull away. I was naturally allergic to it.

JW: Many black jazz musicians married white women. Why do you think that is?

SJ: I don’t know. Most of the cats that I knew had white wives, but I have no clue why. Most loved each other, and I suppose people are attracted to differences and the people they care about and respect most, regardless of color.

JW: Did Jordan take you seriously as a singer?

SJ: He did. We didn’t play together or record because I wasn’t ready to sing like that. I was just enjoying it.

JW: Are you sorry you didn’t record earlier, in the ‘50s?

SJ: No. I never set out to be a diva. I just wanted to dedicate my life to the music and have fun doing it.

JW: What changed your mind when you began to record seriously in 1962?

SJ: I was singing at the Page Three club in Greenwich Village, two nights a week. I wasn’t singing for the money. I was paid only $6 a night, and by the time I paid the babysitter, I didn’t have much left. Then George Russell came in one night.

JW: Your first major recording was You Are My Sunshine on Russell’s Outer View album. That’s quite a recording.

SJ: George had come in to hear pianist Jack Reilly, one of his students, and Steve Swallow on bass. Back then I would do two sets a night. Monday night was session night, when all the singers sang there. I was the jazz singer.

JW: What happened?

SJ: After I sang, George liked what he heard and came up to me afterward. He said, “Where do you come from?”—meaning where did I grow up and what was my background. I said, “I come from hell, man.” We then spent time talking and I told him my life story.

JW: What was Russell's response?

SJ: He asked for my number. I gave it to him, and not long afterward he called me. He asked me to come down to his place to hear something. My daughter was at a friend’s house, so I went.

JW: What did Russell play for you when you arrived?

SJ: He played this incredible introduction to a song. Then he stopped cold and said, “Sing You Are My Sunshine here.” I said, “What, are you kidding? There’s nobody to sing with.”

JW: What did he say?

SJ: George said, “That’s OK. I want you to sing by yourself. You said you sang by yourself as a kid.”

JW: How did he know so much about you?

SJ: What I didn’t tell you is that in addition to talking about my background, we actually drove down to Pennsylvania, to my grandparents’ house. George wanted to get a full feeling for where I had come from.

JW: What happened down there?

SJ: Well, it was me, my grandmother and George. Everyone else in my family there had died or moved away except for her. She said, “Let’s go up to the bar for a drink.” So we did, and my grandmother tried to pass us off as big stars. A coal miner in there looked at me and said, “Do you still sing You Are My Sunshine, Jeanie?”

JW: What did you say?

SJ: I said, “No.” George turned to me surprised and said, “Why not?” So he goes over to this beat-up upright piano and starts to play the song. My grandmother soon pushed him off and said, “That’s not the way it goes” and played it while I sang. I think that’s when he realized where I came from [laughs].

JW: So when you went down to Russell’s place, he had written an arrangement that reflected your background?

SJ: Yes. He wanted it to be like a documentary of my rough upbringing in coal country. He wanted to call it, A Drinking Song. But there was only one miner in the bar that day, so he couldn’t really do that.

JW: Looking back, what do you think of Russell?

SJ: I think he was an underrated genius. He was also a kind man. He paid for my divorce from Duke in 1962 or ’63 and was good to my daughter. He’d take her to nursery school when I couldn’t.

JW: Was it hard breaking up with Jordan?

SJ: Yes. He left me, and I had to raise my daughter alone. Duke was a drug addict and had left because he had met someone else who would support his habit. He didn’t even come to the hospital to see his child when she was born. It was all very painful.

JW: How did your first album Portrait of Sheila for Blue Note happen?

SJ: George loved my singing and paid for a demo. Then he took it around to Prestige and Blue Note. Blue Note picked it up first, and that was the beginning of my serious recording career.

JW: How would you describe your vocal style?

SJ: I don’t’ know. Honest, I guess. I don’t try to be anything else but that. I just sing for the joy of singing. I never worried about why some singers were making it and I wasn’t. I just wanted to keep the music alive, especially Bird’s music. Musicians always thank Miles Davis and John Coltrane for inspiring them. They never thank Bird. Sonny Rollins talks about Bird all the time. Sonny is something else. He’s a beautiful human being. He’s so special. So humble.

JW: Are you recording again soon?

SJ: I’m trying to work on a duo album with Steve Kuhn. But I hate to record. I don’t like studios.