Ellen Johnson
234 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8108-8836-4
Rowman & Littlefield
2014
By IAN PATTERSON,
Published: November 12, 2014
That Ellen Johnson's revealing portrait of Sheila Jordan is the first full biography of the eighty five-year old Pennsylvanian-born singer reaffirms the notion that the dominant jazz narrative has always lionized certain artists to the exclusion of others.
As the progenitor of the bass and vocal duo Jordan was an innovative figure from the get go. Instigator of arguably the first solo jazz vocal program in America in the late 1970s and one of the finest exponents of scat that's ever drawn breath, Jordan's influence as a creative musician and educator has been significant yet until quite late in her life, undervalued.
Jordan's rightful place in the annals of jazz history, Johnson notes, is in part because she "helped blaze a path for women in music during a suppressed era." That era in question was the bebop era of the 1940s and 1950s, when Jordan first set out on an extraordinary journey that has justifiably brought her comparison with Billie Holiday and Betty Carter.
Jordan's achievements, as Johnson depicts, are as much defined by the stands she has taken on basic human rights as they are for her music. As a single mother Jordan was already going against the social conventions of the time. As a partner in a mixed-race marriage and as a white singer in an Afro-American vocal trio she challenged the racial segregation and racial discrimination then rife in the United States of America.
read more: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/jazz-child-a-portrait-of-sheila-jordan-sheila-jordan-by-ian-patterson.php#.VGUXPYcon9t
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