‘Portrait Now’ by Sheila Jordan Review: A Jazz Autobiography WSJ

The nonagenarian singer deploys her soulful scatting on an album that reveals who she is today while offering a retrospective of her career.

By Will Friedwald | Wall Street Journal

March 3, 2025 4:30 pm 

In 1962, the jazz singer Sheila Jordan recorded her first album, which was titled “Portrait of Sheila” when issued by Blue Note Records in early 1963. Sixty years—and roughly 25 albums—later, she went into a Bronx, N.Y., studio and cut her newest one, “Portrait Now,” which refers to that first release in its title.

What makes that six-decade span even more noteworthy is that Ms. Jordan was hardly a newcomer in 1963; she would turn 35 that year, and had already spent most of her career on the fringes of the jazz world. And even when she reached her mid-40s—the age when such major singers as Billie Holiday and Nat King Cole arrived at the end of their lives and careers—she was still getting started as a recording artist: She cut her second album as leader, “Confirmation,” in 1975.

“Portrait Now” (Dot Time Records) is true to its title, and a lot more. It’s not only a statement about where Ms. Jordan is today—and she’s hardly finished yet—but a retrospective of her career thus far.

As an artist, Ms. Jordan has always been a tantalizing combination of the old fashioned and the futuristic. She spends much of each set scatting and improvising wordless aural flights-of-fancy, but bases nearly everything she does on time-tested numbers, sometimes going back to songs that virtually no one has sung for decades—like “Laugh Clown, Laugh,” a waltz from the same year she was born, 1928, that’s on the new disc.

The dichotomy continues: Ms. Jordan is faithful enough to the songs as written to even perform verses that virtually no singer has ever sung, like those normally skipped on “Am I Blue,” the 1929 torch song written for Ethel Waters, and Ray Noble’s “The Touch of Your Lips.” And while you might think that, as a nonagenarian, she would want to work with a larger ensemble that could easily mask the marks of age, Ms. Jordan does the opposite: She performs with the most minimal accompaniment possible. There are only two other musicians on “Portrait Now,” bassist Harvie S and guitarist Roni Ben-Hur, and, for the most part, they play behind her on separate tracks. “Am I Blue” and the final number, “Relaxing at Camarillo” are among the few featuring both guitar and bass.

All of which adds to an overwhelming, and incredibly refreshing, sense of honesty and authenticity. Ms. Jordan sounds like no one but herself—here a veteran vocalist with reliable pitch and a superior sense of time. She swings effortlessly and flawlessly. She states in an interview, found in the warm and affectionate liner notes by James Gavin, that her insistence on scatting and working with these minimalist ensembles has led some to think of her as “too far-out.” But she’s just the opposite. She keeps everything resolutely simple and delivers every lyric like she means it; even when she sings wordlessly, she scats from the heart.

Ms. Jordan takes these older numbers—the famous and the obscure—and imbues them with both sincerity and profundity. She’s particularly moving on a song of the natural world, the 1932 “Willow Weep for Me,” in which, courtesy of composer Ann Ronell, she speaks directly to the trees. But she’s anything but lachrymose on Leonard Bernstein’s glowingly optimistic “Lucky to Be Me.” Even “Laugh Clown, Laugh,” which was pop music’s answer to “Pagliacci,” is now swinging and upbeat rather than melodramatic.

On a philosophical song like “You Must Believe in Spring,” Ms. Jordan conveys not only  the wisdom of age but a heartfelt optimism—her attitude is uniquely fine-tuned to correspond with that of the song. (Incidentally, Alan Bergman, co-writer of that classic tune, turns 100 years old later this year.) There are a few songs here that began as modern jazz originals, such as Kenny Dorham’s “Fair Weather” and Tadd Dameron’s “If You Could See Me Now,” and Ms. Jordan’s own “Workshop Blues” has a descending melody slightly reminiscent of the standard “Alone Together” as well as Benny Golson’s “Stablemates.” Along the way she also gives us the very touching ballad “Inside a Silent Tear” by the iconic pianist-singer Blossom Dearie.

melodramatic.

The set ends with Charlie Parker’s blues, “Relaxing at Camarillo.” Ms. Jordan wrote the lyrics, which consist of a few brief autobiographical lines in which she reminisces about hearing “Bird” play this very song live at Birdland “way back in 1951.” “What a feeling,” she tells us. “I’ll never forget the joy.” It’s that same joy that’s endemic in everything Sheila Jordan does.

— Mr. Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for the Journal. He is the 2024 winner of the Jazz Journalists Association Lifetime Achievement award.