BLP 9002

Sheila Jordan - Portrait Of Sheila

Released - 1962

Recording and Session Information

Barry Galbraith, guitar; Steve Swallow, bass; Denzil Best, drums; Sheila Jordan, vocals.

tk.8 Falling In Love With Love
tk.13 Am I Blue
tk.19 Dat Dere
tk.22 If You Could See Me Now
tk.27 Baltimore Oriole
tk.31 When The World Was Young

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, October 12, 1962
Barry Galbraith, guitar; Steve Swallow, bass; Denzil Best, drums; Sheila Jordan, vocals.

tk.43 I'm A Fool To Want You
tk.46 Hum Drum Blues
tk.59 Willow Weep For Me
tk.61 Let's Face The Music And Dance
tk.65 Who Can I Turn To Now
tk.66 Laugh, Clown, Laugh

Session Photos

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Falling In Love With Love	Rodgers-Hart	September 19 1962
If You Could See Me Now	Sigman-Dameron	September 19 1962
Am I Blue	Clarke-Akst	September 19 1962
Dat Dere	Bobby Timmons	September 19 1962
When The World Was Young	Mercer-Philippe-Gérard	September 19 1962
Let's Face The Music And Dance	Berlin	October 12 1962
Side Two
Laugh, Clown, Laugh	Young-Lewis-Fiorito	October 12 1962
Who Can I Turn To?	Wilder-Engvick	October 12 1962
Baltimore Oriole	Carmichael-Webster	October 12 1962
I'm A Fool To Want You	Sinatra-Wolf-Herron	October 12 1962
Hum Drum Blues	Oscar Brown Jr.	October 12 1962
Willow Weep For Me	Ronell	October 12 1962

Liner Notes

First in Detroit and the New York, Sheila Jordan became an "in" singer among jazz musicians. Charlie Parker referred to her "million-dollar ears" and other jazzmen would always include her in their exceedingly small list of real jazz singers. But Sheila remained unheralded in the jazz press. Work was intermittent; and since she would only record under her own conditions, she hardly ever recorded. Yet Sheila continued singing at clubs around New York and in sessions for kicks. Finally, all her years of preparation and dues-paying seem about to result in that wider recognition her uniquely expressive story-telling has long merited.

There is, for one thing, her first album which, as you will hear, marks her unmistakably a jazz dinger. There is also Don Heckman's review in Down beat in the fall of 1962, an appraisal which, I expect, will soon be followed by other libations from critics around the country. Sheila, Don Heckman, wrote, "has the rare ability to draw her audience into a world that is completely her own - to reach them with an emotional impact that is devastatingly personal."

Sheila accomplishes this acts of mesmerism not only through her unusually distilled emotional power but also by means of remarkable musicianship. As Heckman continued, "Her inflections and ornamentations are all instruments, rather than vocal, and she doesn't hesitate to extend herself to the limits of the chord changes." Yet, for all her instrumental skill, Sheila never allows her performances to become merely exercises in the subtleties of technique. She creates and sustains a wide range of moods , and she infuses the lyrics with intimations of autobiography. "A good jazz singer," Heckman accurately noted, "like a good jazz musician, performs out of a deep inner need that can only express itself musically. Style and personality are secondary to the expression of a natural and spontaneous emotion."

It is a pervasive sense of spontaneity, of unquenchable improvisation that also characterizes Sheila's singing. Her insistence on singing as she feels at the moment leads to continuous improvisation which has occasionally lost her jobs because she transcended the limitations of a club owner's conception of how surprising and challenging a singer can be.

Born in Detroit, November 18 1929, Sheila was raised by her grandmother in Summerhill, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town. By the age of three, she was on a stage: "From the first I can remember," Sheila adds, "they'd get me to sing for every occasion in school." At nine, she was on a radio show in Altoona, and some love letters cam in because she just didn't sound like a child. By the time her second year in high school began, Sheila had moved back to Detroit. She had stopped singing, embarrassed by the teasing of her contemporaries.

After two years, however, she began to listen to Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. The urge to sing returned, and she started attending Club Sudan in Detroit, hoping to get a chance to sing jazz with people who were as drawn to the music as she was. Two young experimenters in singing without words allowed her to rehearse with them, and the trio became a precursor of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. When passing through, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie encouraged Sheila and her colleagues to sit in. Local musicians such as Tommy Flanagan and Kenny Burrell began to hire Sheila whenever they could.

More than any singer, it was Charlie Parker who most influenced Sheila. She sang along with his records, training her ear thereby. "He made me," she explained, "want top sing what he played." In 1950, she steeled herself to try to make it in New York. Two years later, she married pianist Duke Jordan. (They have since been divorced). In New York, Sheila would sit in with Charlie Parker and Kenny Dorham, and would sometimes appear at Minton's after hours, but she wasn't able for a long time to cope with the multiple problems of becoming established in the professional jazz field. "I got scared," she explained. "It was very important for me to sing, but it was too much of a rat race out there."

Sheila also decided that she had to devote much of her time to being a mother. Her girl, Traci, is now seven, and for some time, Sheila has been both father and mother to he. A day job was inevitable, and for six and a half years, she has been a typist in an advertising agency. Gradually, she also began to sing occasionally at night. For the past six years, she has been at Page Three in Greenwich Village on and off as well as a few other rooms. It was at Page Three that George Russell heard her about a year ago. "Sheila's singing," Russell told a friend, "made my skin crawl." At about the same time, Ruth Mason, a friend of Sheila, took Alfred Lion to hear Sheila. He was equally impressed. When Russell later brought Lion an acetate of Sheila's singing, Lion decided to record her, even though blue Note had as a policy not recorded jazz vocalists before. "The more I heard her," says Lion, "the more I was moved by her extraordinary talent."

"Alfred was just beautiful," says Sheila." He let me do what I wanted and he gave me all the time I needed, including overtime. I'd turn down albums before because and a&r man wanted to fit me into some kind of artificial format. Alfred just let me be." To be fully herself, Sheila also asked that the accompaniment be limited to from one to three musicians. (On Dat Dere, she sings with just bass; on Who Can I Turn to Now, there is only guitar; and in Baltimore Oriole and Hum Drum Blues, she is backed by just bass and drums).

"The reason I like only a small group," Sheila explains, "is that I have a lot of ideas going once when I start to improvise, and I can't help but concentrate on what I hear behind me. If I hear too much, if someone plays changes that don't go with the way I feel the song, my own invention begins to fade." The three accompanists are particularly apt for Sheila's uncommonly lyrical and supple style. "Barry," Sheila notes, "plays such beautiful, simple chords for a singer. Even if you didn't believe in what you were singing, he'd make you feel like believing. And if you believe to start with, his playing makes the experience so much greater."

Steve Swallow, a superior young bassist, has worked with, among other groups, those of George Russell, Don Ellis, Jimmy Giuffre, and Marian MacPartland. "Singing with Steve," Sheila emphasizes, "is a very rewarding challenge. He has a different way of playing than many other bassists. Not only his chord sense, but the sound he gets. In Baltimore Oriole, for another example, there's a passage in which he plays harmony with me." Another quality in Swallow's work which stimulates Sheila is the fact that, as she puts it, "he somehow always seems to anticipate what I'm going to do. And that certainly adds to my confidence and feeling of relaxation." As for Denzil Best, long recognized as a masterful accompanist, Sheila underlines his "great good taste."

Sheila's repertory reflects a kaleidoscope of moods - the resilient buoyancy of Falling In Love With Love, for one. Here, and all through the album, Sheila demonstrates how secure an inner sense if swing she has and the resourcefulness of her melodic imagination. The tender, intimately evocative If You Could See Me Now is based on chord changes used by Bill Evans when he plays the tune. "George Russell took me to hear Bill," Sheila recalls, "and when I heard him play this, he made me cry."

Sheila's extraordinary pliability - her capacity to elasticize and personalize a melodic and rhythmic line without distorting it - is again evident in Am I Blue. She sings Dat Dere with her daughter, Traci, in mind. "The song," says Sheila, "is so much like her. All the questions and carryings on." "In When The World Was Young," says Sheila, "I was kind of play acting with myself. Imagining what it would be like to be the belle of the ball, a party girl. I know I'm not, and yet it's fun to fantasize.

Let's Face the Music And Dance allows Sheila to display the promise of abandon that is also latent in her singing. Although she can get into the marrow of a ballad and transmute it into seamless lyricism, Sheila can also be playful and mockingly light-hearted. Note too the flowing gracefulness of her conception in Laugh, Clown, Laugh; the unusual combination of fragility and a firm sense of direction in Who Can I Turn To; the tangy irony which animates Baltimore Oriole; the reflective regret which never becomes soggily self-conscious in I'm A Fool to Want You; the expert sense of rhythm in the stop-time passages of Hum Drum Blues; and the wounding, self-exposing warmth in Willow Weep For Me.

Always, in all manner of material, there is Sheila's unerring ear, clarity of diction, and sensitive feeling dynamics. Sheila says that for a number of years, she lacked confidence. Yet she always had the ultimate confidence - refusal to compromise. About a year ago, when she turned down one company's plan to record her with a kind of band she doesn't feel comfortable with, the a&r man said, "You're losing a lot of money by being stubborn." "I don't care," said Sheila, "I can't sing anything I don't believe in."

"Now," says Sheila, "I do feel confidence coming back, confidence too that I can get more jobs singing the way I want to." On the basis of this album, if anyone now singing jazz has the right to have confidence, it is Sheila Jordan. She's waited a long time, but I'll be very surprised if Sheila soon won't have to leave that day job and spend her time doing what she is best at - being herself through music.

- NAT HENTOFF

Cover Photo by ZIGGY WILLIAMS
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER