Sheila Jordan, Fearless Vocal Improviser, Is Dead at 96

Sheila Jordan, who never achieved the name recognition of a Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughan but who came to be recognized as one of the great singers in jazz, died on Monday in New York City. She was 96.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Tracey Jordan.

A daredevil improviser with a lyrical voice that was extraordinarily responsive to her instinctive imagination, Ms. Jordan always seemed to be singing first for her fellow musicians. Her taste was regarded as impeccable, and she did not pander. Because of this, and also because of career-narrowing choices she made in her private life, she remained little known to the general public. Yet she never stopped singing, and those audiences that did hear her tended to adore her.

Named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2012 at the age of 84, Ms. Jordan continued to expand her global fan base right up to her death.

A jazz insider from her teenage years, she seemed to have known both the giants and the sidemen in that world, although she recorded with only a comparative few. Her first album under her own name, “Portrait of Sheila,” arrived relatively late in her career, in 1963, when she was 34, but its release on the Rolls-Royce of jazz record labels, Blue Note — which had never before recorded a singer, by policy — heralded an important new voice in jazz.

Reviewers were rapturous. Billboard magazine awarded the album its four-star rating for having “sufficient commercial potential” to “merit being stocked by most dealers.” Ms. Jordan, however, would not make another record of her own for more than a dozen years.

The reasons for this were as varied as the vocal inflections that Ms. Jordan brought to her interpretations of a song. A primary contributor was an acknowledged lack of self-confidence. Of equal significance was her decision, as a single mother, to focus on raising her only child, restricting her club work. Instead, she took a secretarial job at a New York advertising agency that she held for 25 years.

Ms. Jordan also struggled with alcoholism and later with cocaine addiction before entering a recovery program and overcoming them.

She was an inveterate chance taker as a singer, but her performances were rarely just exhibitions of virtuosity. She loved to toy with tempos, spinning out long vocal lines seemingly without effort and deploying a vibrant vibrato eloquently.

Sheila Jeanette Dawson was born on Nov. 18, 1928, in Detroit to Donald and Margaret (Hull) Dawson, both 21-year-old factory workers for General Motors. Her father was with her mother when she gave birth, along with a local doctor, in a room furnished with a Murphy bed. He then pretty much disappeared. He later remarried and fathered five more children, whom Ms. Jordan would get to know in later years.

Within months, her mother abandoned motherhood in favor of alcohol and a cycle of unhappy relationships. She sent her infant daughter to live with her maternal grandparents, Walter and Irene Hull, who raised her alongside their nine children in Summerhill, Pa., a coal town in the Allegheny Mountains.

Sheila grew up ridiculed by local children for her family’s poverty. “We had an outhouse and no water in the house,” Ms. Jordan noted in the oral history. She was called a “half-breed.” (“I have Native American on my grandfather’s side,” she said. “Also on my father’s.”)

In 1942, at 14, she was reclaimed by her mother — rescued, essentially, from her grandparents’ own alcoholic abusiveness. The improvement in relative safety was nominal; Ms. Jordan recalled being molested by at least one of her “stepfathers” while her mother was passed out. Still, the return to Detroit resulted in a life-altering introduction during her sophomore year of high school to the music of the saxophonist and modern jazz pioneer Charlie Parker, known to his fans as Bird.

“I always sang but I didn’t know what kind of music I wanted to sing,” Ms. Jordan told Ellen Johnson, the author of “Jazz Child: A Portrait of Sheila Jordan” (2014). “Until that unforgettable day I went to the hamburger joint across the street from my high school.” Looking through the selection of songs on the jukebox, she chose “Now’s the Time” by Charlie Parker and His Reboppers.

“After the first four notes I was hooked,” she said. “I got goose bumps, and I instantly knew that was the music I had been waiting to hear and would dedicate my life to singing.”

Detroit in the 1940s had a thriving jazz scene. Ms. Jordan plunged in and became a major participant under the name Jeannie Dawson. She discovered she had a rare ability to learn Parker’s wildly intricate solos off his records and sing them. She even set her own lyrics to some. In time, Parker, who came to play in Detroit regularly, met his acolyte, who was too young to get into clubs but who listened to him devotedly from the backdoor alley.

“I sang one of Bird’s songs and he said to me, ‘You have million-dollar ears, kid,’” she recalled. “I didn’t even know what that meant.”

Jeannie Dawson slowly built a career for herself around Detroit as a jazz singer while maintaining a parallel supporting career as a typist. She excelled at both. In 1951, she moved to New York City,

“I just needed to get out of Detroit,” Ms. Jordan was quoted as saying in “Jazz Child.” “I couldn’t take the racial prejudice, and I thought New York would be better.”

She joined the typing pool at the Madison Avenue ad agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample while singing at night at jam sessions in jazz clubs. She also began studying with the pianist and composer Lennie Tristano, one of the great progressive thinkers and teachers in jazz, whose support helped build her confidence.

In 1953, she married Duke Jordan, the pianist in Parker’s original quartet, whom she had begun seeing in Detroit. Like Parker, her new husband was addicted to heroin.

The marriage was a disaster, with Mr. Jordan almost entirely absent, even for the birth of their daughter, Tracey, in 1955. (The couple divorced in 1962.) In addition to her daughter, Ms. Jordan is survived by her half sister, Jacquelynn Ann Dawson-Tailford.

Ms. Jordan’s life immediately came to revolve around her baby, supported by a new day job at the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach that would sustain her for the next quarter-century. Still, she managed to find a singing spot one night a week at the Greenwich Village nightspot Page Three, a pre-L.G.B.T.Q. haven with a rotating cast of colorful performers and up-and-coming accompanists, including the jazz pianists Dave Frishberg, Herbie Nichols and Cecil Taylor.

She was also discovered by George Russell, an experimental jazz theorist, who brought Ms. Jordan into a recording studio for her first time to sing his avant-garde rearrangement of one of the first songs Ms. Jordan had learned as a child, the coal-miner ballad “You Are My Sunshine,” for his 1962 album, “The Outer View.” Her stark, nearly a cappella rendition stopped traffic in the jazz community and got her a date with Blue Note.

In 1975, with her daughter in college, Ms. Jordan finally returned to a recording studio to make “Confirmation” for the Japanese label East Wind. Thereafter, she never stopped recording — more than two dozen albums as leader or co-leader, including “Sheila Jordan Live at Mezzrow,” released when she was 92, and “Portrait Now,” released this year.

She also never stopped performing — at home and, increasingly, abroad, often in tandem with Harvie S or Cameron Brown on bass, as well as the pianist and composer Steve Kuhn.

In 1977, Ms. Jordan was invited to sing at an afternoon concert at the City College of New York in Manhattan. That concert, and the talk-back that followed, soon evolved into the creation of a collegiate jazz vocal programs at C.C.N.Y., one of the first programs of its kind in the United States.

A groundbreaking parallel career as a jazz educator and vocal mentor ensued, with Ms. Jordan exerting a rousing influence on new generations of young female singers. Her methodology, as recorded in her biography, remained elemental.

“I just want to keep this music alive by inspiring others to love it as much as I do,” she said.

John Yoon contributed reporting.