During her second year of high school in Detroit, Sheila Jeanette Dawson looked at the selection of songs on the jukebox in a hamburger hangout across the street from her school. She picked “Now’s the Time” by Charlie Parker and His Reboppers
“After the first four notes, I was hooked,” she told Ellen Johnson, author of Jazz Child: A Portrait of Sheila Jordan (Rowman and Littlefield: 2014). “I got goose bumps,” she said, “and I instantly knew that was the music I had been waiting to hear and would dedicate my life to singing.” (She became Sheila Jordan after marrying pianist Duke Jordan in 1953; they were divorced in 1962).
Sheila Jordan passed away on August 11, 2025, at home in Manhattan at the age of 96. After hearing that Charlie Parker record, “she never stopped singing,” wrote The New York Times’ Barry Singer. “She was recognized as one of the great singers in jazz,” he added, “although she never achieved the name recognition of a Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughan.”
In an article posted on the Jazz Journalists Association website, Johnson wrote that, “Sheila’s story is not just one of music, but of spirit. Her devotion to jazz has been lifelong, ferocious and tender all at once. She was a disciple of the revolutionary alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, or ‘The Bird’ as she always reverently called him. Sheila lived and breathed bebop, absorbing its complexities not just as a musical style but as a way of being.”
In a 1998 interview with author James Gavin, she described herself as being “totally addicted to bebop. I think it was the emotion. God, when Fats Navarro played a solo, it made my hair stand up. I could sit and cry when Bird played. Tears of everything, joy, pain, sadness.”
Her first album, Portrait of Sheila, was recorded for Blue Note in 1963. She was accompanied by guitarist Barry Galbraith, bassist Steve Swallow, and drummer Denzil Best on such pop and jazz standards as Rodgers and Hart’s “Falling in Love with Love” and Bobby Timmons’ and Oscar Brown, Jr.’s “Dat Dere.” Blue Note Records has issued a statement saying, Portrait of Sheila will be reissued this fall as part of its Tone Poet Vinyl Series.
After Portrait of Sheila, Jordan did not make another recording for 12 years. There were several reasons: She had a child (with Duke Jordan) that she had to raise as a single mother, and she wrestled with alcoholism and cocaine addiction before beating both with recovery programs. While working at the Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency, she performed one night a week at a Greenwich Village club called Page Three. Among others who played there were pianists Dave Frishberg, Herbie Nichols, and Cecil Taylor.
In 1975, Jordan resumed recording, making an album, Confirmation, for the Japanese East Wind label. She recorded several albums after that, highlighted, perhaps, by her Cellar Live release, Sheila Jordan Live at Mezzrow, recorded in October 2021 when she was 92.
In its review of that album, DownBeat said,“Live At Mezzrow captures Jordan’s nuance, grace and soulful swing . . . Jordan sang her way through a stunning musical retrospective, reflecting on a lifetime in service of swing.” The article pointed out that Jordan said, “I love singing at Mezzrow. It is much like the clubs of the olden days on 52nd Street, and what Spike Wilner is doing to keep the music alive is fantastic.’
Mezzrow Owner and Live At Mezzrow Executive Producer Wilner added, “Sheila Jordan delivers a vociferous performance of standards and bebop. She literally glows with the resonant age of her accomplishments and associations . . . She has the core vibration of the true Detroit sound and hails from the very greatest period of that music. Her fellow Detroiters, such as Barry Harris, Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan and others, have all but left us, but she is still here and still vibrant.”
In 2012, Jordan was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. In a statement after her death, NEA called Jordan, “One of the premier singers in jazz . . . A superb scat singer, Jordan could just as easily reach the emotional depths of a ballad. Whether singing well-known standards or original material, she made it all sound like no one else.”
Pianist Emmet Cohen, on Facebook, called Jordan “one of the greatest spirits jazz has ever known, a truly original artist, a kind friend to so many, and a fearless jazz warrior. I’m forever grateful for her mentorship and deeply inspired by the joyous and generous way she lived her life. When she joined us at Emmet’s Place, she was 93 years old and tackled that five-floor walk-up with ease! She dubbed herself our ‘spiritual grandmother’, and that’s exactly who she became — to so many.”
Jordan is survived by her daughter, Tracey, and a half-sister, Jacquelynn Ann Dawson-Tailford.
PHOTO BY JIMMY BRUCH