Thinking of Sheila Jordan Today
- Bill Milkowski
- Aug 6
- 8 min read
The beloved jazz singer is currently in hospice care and needs our help

The great Sheila Jordan is now in hospice care. The 96-year-old NEA Jazz Master was relocated from the Actors Fund Nursing Home in Englewood, New Jersey to her home in New York City. Her daughter Tracey is now organizing a Go Fund Me campaign to offset the costs of mounting medical bills. As she pointed out, “Unfortunately, Medicare only provides 10 hours of Home Hospice Care Aide services per week. As a result, we have been paying out of pocket for a private Home Care Aide to come during the day for a few hours, and I've been spending the remainder of the time nursing my mom since July 7th. The emotional toll of watching my mom's health decline is immense, and I'm physically and emotionally exhausted while being financially drained.”
She adds, “A few of my mom’s friends have been incredibly supportive, either by donating funds or offering to spend a few nights or afternoons with her, or both. I am deeply grateful for these recent donations. But unfortunately, it’s not enough. The healthcare system in our country is broken. Medicare limits her health-care coverage and doesn’t come close to covering our expenses.”
Anyone who was ever touched by one of Sheila Jordan’s performances — as I have been on countless occasions — should donate today: https://gofund.me/23dd7d1e
I had the pleasure of interviewing the legendary “Jazz Child” for a Jazz Times piece in 2009. We sat in her pad just blocks from the Village Vanguard and reminisced, following her gala 80th birthday performance with strings (featuring violinist Mark Feldman) at Dizzy’s Club.
I had previously seen Sheila perform in intimate duo settings with bassists Harvie S. and Cameron Brown (her 1995 MA Recordings album with the artist formerly known as Swartz was called The Very Thought of Two while her 2000 HighNote album with Brown continued that punny title tradition with I’ve Grown Accustomed to the Bass).
I had also caught Sheila on a few occasions with the Steve Kuhn Trio and had the absolute thrill of seeing her at Birdland one night (Sept. 16, 2015) trading scatting licks with Jon Hendricks on his 94th birthday while also engaging in spirited vocalese on the bandstand with fellow vocalists Bob Dorough, Annie Ross and Andy Bey; clearly the hippest bop choir in jazz history.

Even after I left New York, right before the pandemic engulfed the city, I continued to follow Sheila by streaming her multiple performances at sculptor Jimmy Greenfield’s Soapbox Gallery, either with bassist Brown or in a trio setting with guitarist Ron Ben-Hur and bassist Harvie S (like this Sept. 1, 2021 performance of her autobiographical “Sheila’s Blues”):
And I was stunned in 2021 when Capri Records undcovered her Comes Love — Lost Session 1960, a session that found her in youthful voice.
It’s been a few years since I’ve seen Sheila Jordan perform. The last time was when she sat in with pianist Emmett Cohen’s trio for his popular pandemic-era streaming show, “Live at Emmett’s Place,” from January 3, 2022.
Every performance by this beloved jazz singer was a gift, imbued with humor, wisdom and, of course, swing. (And here’s that Jazz Times story I did back in 2009):
To celebrate her 80th birthday last November, Sheila Jordan hired a string quartet to accompany her regular trio of longtime collaborator and pianist Steve Kuhn, bassist David Finck and drummer Billy Drummond in a weeklong engagement at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in New York. “I wanted to sing with a string quartet ever since I heard Bird With Strings,” confides the lifelong Charlie Parker fanatic. “I had worked with strings before at a festival in Vancouver, also a few times in Italy, but I had never done it in the States. And to work with strings in New York, a city I love so much, was a special treat for me. I told myself, ‘I don’t care what it costs me; I’m gonna make it happen.’ So it was my 80th birthday gift to myself.”
Her Dizzy’s gig turned out to be a major triumph. Canadian cellist Harold Birston, who had worked with Jordan before in Vancouver, wrote some special arrangements for the occasion, including a rendition of Parker’s “Confirmation” that incorporated a note-for-note transcription of Bird’s two-chorus solo. With violinist Mark Feldman also contributing virtuosic solos on pieces like Tom Harrell’s “Out to Sea,” Dave Frishberg’s “Heart’s Desire,” the Dietz-Schwartz standard “Haunted Heart” and a clever medley of Frank Loesser’s “Inch Worm” and Larry Gelb’s “The Caterpillar Song,” Jordan sang impressionistic curlicues around the notes, never quite landing directly on them but rather fluttering around them as if in zero gravity. And she delivered each tune with such personal flair and old-school charisma that she quickly won over the adoring Dizzy’s audience.
“Thank you, my dears, my darlings,” she would say to them after each round of applause. And her casual between-song banter, in which she shared anecdotes about her amazing journey from small-town poverty to the heights of bebop to her current status as a grand dame of jazz, was both entertaining and revealing.
You can hear that kind of openness and instant rapport with her audience on Jordan’s latest recording, the live Winter Sunshine (Justin Time). Recorded at the Upstairs club in Montreal during the frigid month of February, Jordan warms up the audience with her inventive balladic take on George and Ira Gershwin’s “Lady Be Good,” then follows with swinging renditions of Bobby Timmons’ “Dat Dere,” interpreting Oscar Brown Jr.’s playful lyrics, and Bronislaw Kaper’s “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm,” which segues neatly into Miles Davis’ “Little Willie Leaps.”
But Jordan makes her biggest impact on that album with autobiographical tunes like “The Crossing,” written after her recovery from alcoholism, and “Sheila’s Blues,” a starkly dramatic tune that she recorded on four previous occasions and which has been her crowd-pleasing set closer for years.
"Sheila's Blues” tells the tale of little Sheila Jeanette Dawson. Born in Detroit on Nov. 18, 1928 (on Mickey Mouse’s birthday, as she often points out) she was raised by her grandparents in the coal-mining town of Ehrenfield, Pa. (aka “Scoopy Town”). “Mother had me when she was 17,” she explains. “And since she and my father were not together, I was sent to live in Pennsylvania with my grandparents while my mother stayed in Detroit to work in the factory.”
She grew up there in a house with six relatives. “My aunts and uncles were more like my brothers and sisters,” she recalls. “In fact, one uncle was six years younger than me. We had no heat or plumbing in our house and food was scarce. And there was a lot of alcoholism in my family. My grandmother and grandfather did the best they could but we were very poor and there was a lot of suffering. It was not a happy childhood.”
Singing became Sheila’s salvation during those lean years. “I sang when I was sad, I sang when I was happy, I sang when I was scared. All my emotions revolved around singing. Singing was necessary for my existence. I sang because I needed to sing.”
She also remembers as a child serenading the out-of-work coal miners at a local beer garden that her grandmother would frequent. “She used to take me up to these different beer gardens and there would be live music and then they’d get me up there to sing. And my grandma used to say, ‘When they throw money at you, don’t stop singing. Don’t pick it up until after you’re through singing.'”
By the time Jordan returned to Detroit as a teenager, she met hipsters Skeeter Spight and Leroy Mitchell and formed a kind of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross-styled singing group with them. Along with fellow Bird fanatics like Barry Harris, Kenny Burrell and Tommy Flanagan, they would follow Charlie Parker from places like the Club Sudan to El Sino to hear him play. Since they were all too young to get into the clubs, they would invariably hang out in the alley and peek into the back window to catch a glimpse of Bird in flight. “One time he came out between sets and played his sax to us kids standing out there in the alley,” she recalls. “I’ll never forget that night.”
In Detroit, Jordan dated saxophonist Frank Wess, though the sight of an interracial couple in late-’40s Detroit was a cause for agitation among the locals. “There was so much racial prejudice, it was terrible,” she says. “I was always being hassled, constantly down at the police station being questioned as to why I hung around with black people. Of course, those were not the words they used. I hated that other word they used. … I can’t even say it. The police would constantly stop me and my black friends for no reason, coming to and from the clubs, and they’d ask where I lived, how old I was, where I was going. It got to be a real drag, so I finally decided to split. The racial prejudice drove me out of Detroit. But I was ready to leave anyway to go follow Bird’s music to New York.”
Shortly after arriving in town in 1951, Jordan began studying with Lennie Tristano and hanging at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem after hours. Around this time she also took up with Bird’s piano player, Duke Jordan. “I had met Duke in Detroit and got reacquainted with him in New York,” she says. “Somehow we started going out and we ended up together and got married in 1952. It wasn’t a happy marriage but the nice thing about that was, he was with Bird at the time. So anytime Bird had a gig, I could go and hear him. And Bird would always ask me to sit in.”
In 1955, Sheila gave birth to her daughter Tracey. That same year, her hero Charlie Parker died. “Of course, I was devastated,” she says, “but I wasn’t surprised, in a way. He had fallen prey to this baffling, powerful disease of heroin addiction. He was in bad shape mentally and physically. He was really such a sweet and caring man but the drugs and alcohol made him a different person.”
A few years later, Jordan began singing at the Page Three, which is where composer George Russell first heard her. He recruited Jordan to contribute haunting, ethereal vocals on a unique arrangement he had written on “You Are My Sunshine,” a tune that she used to sing to the out-of-work coal miners in Scoopy Town. That session for Russell’s 1962 Riverside recording The Outer View was her first-ever recording, and led to her own date for Blue Note, Portrait of Sheila, which was recorded later that year and released in 1963. “And then I didn’t record again for about a dozen years,” she says. “I’m not a pusher. I don’t go out there and push. I don’t know how to do that.”
Although Jordan has only 21 albums as a leader to her credit in her 60 years as a vocalist, she has made countless appearances in nightclubs and at festivals all over the world. And every time she hits the stage, she continues to pay tribute to her idol and main inspiration, Charlie Parker. “I cannot let this man’s name die,” she says. “I constantly talk about Bird because some people forget about him or they put him on a back burner. But he’s too important to me. I wouldn’t be sitting here today if it weren’t for Bird.
“It’s amazing because every time I need an uplift, his music picks me up,” she continues. “The first time I heard Bird was on a jukebox. It was a version of ‘Now’s the Time’ by Charlie Parker and his Reboppers, and as I listened to it the hair stood up on my arms. I heard three notes coming out of that jukebox and I said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s the music I’ll dedicate my life to!’
“Then, just yesterday, I was feeling kind of down,” she continues. “I went into a Japanese restaurant and ordered some miso soup, and just as soon as I put the spoon to my mouth … what comes on? Charlie Parker playing ‘Now’s The Time.’ And as I sat there listening to Bird, I said to myself, ‘Yeah, everything’s all right with the world.'”
Jordan still lives in the same Chelsea apartment where she has resided for the past 44 years, within walking distance of some of the Greenwich Village clubs where she used to play during the early ’60s, like the Page Three. “You know, I never thought I’d live to be this old,” she laughs as we finish our tea. “But you can’t fight it. There’s nothing you can do about it, except grow old gracefully. That’s what I want to do.”
Originally Published March 1, 2009
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