Sheila Jordan - Portrait of Sheila (1976 Japanese Blue Note Stereo Vinyl LP)

Sheila Jordan - Portrait of Sheila | Vinyl LP, 1976 Japanese Blue Note Stereo Reissue (LNJ-60006, Jazz Right Now Series, Toshiba EMI)

• The first vocal album on Blue Note, recorded at Van Gelder’s studio in the autumn of 1962, with a singer who had learned her craft from listening to Charlie Parker and modelled her phrasing on horns rather than other vocalists
• Twelve tracks with a sparse trio of guitar, bass and drums, no piano, no horns, letting Jordan’s voice carry everything against Barry Galbraith’s guitar, Steve Swallow’s bass and Denzil Best’s drums
• First Japanese pressing of this title, manufactured by Toshiba EMI with a Reid Miles cover design, produced by Alfred Lion and engineered by Rudy Van Gelder

In the entire Blue Note catalogue from the 1950s and 1960s, only two albums were led by vocalists. This is one of them. Alfred Lion placed it in a new 9000 series, separate from Blue Note’s instrumental catalogue, and then after these two releases never recorded another singer. The reasons are unclear, but the album has endured in a way that makes the label’s reluctance look like a missed opportunity. Jordan came out of the bebop world. She had grown up in Detroit, discovered Parker on a jukebox as a teenager, moved to New York and married his pianist Duke Jordan in 1952. Parker reportedly called her “the woman with the million-dollar ears.” By the time George Russell featured her on The Outer View in 1962, her reputation among musicians was established, and Lion invited her to record for Blue Note. What makes Portrait of Sheila so distinctive is the instrumentation. There is no piano and no horn, just Galbraith’s clean guitar, Swallow’s bass and Best’s brushes. The voice has nowhere to hide, and Jordan doesn’t try to. Her phrasing is rhythmically free, shaped by bebop’s melodic logic rather than the conventions of popular singing. “Dat Dere”, performed as a duo with Swallow alone, is the album’s most celebrated moment.

The programme spans standards and less expected choices: “When the World Was Young” has a European quality that suits Jordan’s approach to melody, “Baltimore Oriole” is a Hoagy Carmichael piece that few other singers have attempted, and “Hum Drum Blues” is two minutes of pure blues singing. Steve Swallow was 22 at the time of these sessions, already showing the melodic instinct on bass that would define his long career with Gary Burton and Carla Bley. Denzil Best, the drummer, was also the composer of “Move” (recorded by Miles Davis for Birth of the Cool) and co-wrote “Bemsha Swing” with Thelonious Monk. He died in 1965. After Portrait of Sheila, Jordan stepped away from recording for over a decade to raise her daughter, returning in the mid-1970s and continuing to perform into her nineties. She died in New York on August 11, 2025, at the age of 96. This 1976 pressing is the first Japanese edition, manufactured by Toshiba EMI as part of the Jazz Right Now series. Catalogue number LNJ-60006 (original Blue Note catalogue: BLP 9002).