Anthropology (Charlie Parker) as performed by Sheila Jordan (sheet music jazz Transcription, Noten)

Sheila Jordan

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Sheila Jordan (Detroit, 1928) was always committed to black music and culture, which, being white, caused her serious problems with racial prejudice in the United States.

Sheila Dawson began singing at a very young age in different clubs in Detroit. She later became a member of the vocal trio Skeeter, Mitch and Jean.

From a very young age she established close ties with the pianist, Tommy Flanagan – a musician very inclined to accompany female jazz singers-with the guitarist, Kenny Burrell, with the magnificent pianist, Barry Harris, and the Detroit boppers circle.

At the beginning of the 50s, she settled in New York. Once in New York, she works by day as a typist at an advertising agency. On Monday and Tuesday nights, Ella Jordan performs at a gay bar in Greenwich Village called Page Three. She there worked with pianist Herbie Nichols and bassist Steve Swallow.

She began singing informally with a trio, and there she met Charlie Parker, whose friendship was instrumental in her settling in New York in 1950.

Immersed in the jazz circles of the Big Apple, Charles Mingus advised her to train her voice with the pianist, Lennie Tristano. With Tristano she spent two years (1950-1952) fundamental for her formation; Tristano taught him theory, harmony, singing by ear and sight-reading music. In 1952, she married Duke Jordan – from whom she would forever take her last name – pianist in 1947 from Charlie Parker’s quintet, and with the birth of her first child, she retired from the stage for a good season, until George Russell left. remembered her.

With Russell’s sextet, Sheila Jordan, he would record for Riverside in 1962, an album that shocked vocal jazz with its arrangements and interpretation. Russell himself convinced the producers of the Blue Note label to make an exception with their policy of not recording singers, and Sheila Jordan had the privilege of being the first jazz singer to record an album for this avant-garde jazz label.

The result was an exceptional album entitled “Portrait of Sheila” which is considered one of the most important vocal jazz records in the entire history of this music. Incomprehensibly, and despite that magnificent record, Sheila Jordan, she did not record a record again until twelve years after that event.

It was in 1975, when he set foot in a recording studio again to record «Confirmation», an album that corroborated his quality and confirmed that his style had matured magnificently. It was the beginning of the recognition of critics and public, and even of his own fellow musicians. His recording activity has not ceased since then, and he has associated with several top pianists, first with Kenny Barron where he left a magnificent album entitled “The Crossing” in 1984 for the Black Haw label, and later with the elegant pianist Steve Khun, with whom still in the 21st century, he performs on tours, concerts and jazz festivals, in a fantastic demonstration of jazz art.

At almost 75 years of age, this extraordinary jazz singer is the almost sole repository of the original legacy of bebop; a living musical treasure in female vocal jazz, as Jimmy Scott is in the male. Apoloybaco was able to verify it live when she came to Seville in one of the extraordinary programming of the Seville Central Theater in the fall of 2000.

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