Jan. 10--What's the sound of youth?
On Friday night it was a voice that swooped and soared, a music that bounded from one offbeat to the next, an imagination that invented lyrics and melodies and riffs on the spot, just like that.
In other words, it was the work of 86-year-old Sheila Jordan at the Green Mill Jazz Club, packed on a frozen January night. Jordan sounded as young as anyone in jazz, even as she showed the interpretive savvy and technical expertise that come only with a life spent in music.
Exactly how Jordan remains so buoyant in manner and free in spirit after all this time only she knows, but perhaps it has something to do with the nature of jazz and her abiding devotion to it. An art form that encourages its practitioners to create something new every night can keep players young and attitudes fresh. Certainly it has worked for Jordan, who launched her career working Detroit clubs in the 1940s and hasn't lost a whit of the whimsy and daring that listeners long ago came to expect from her.
"I'm still alive at 86 years old," she sang as she opened her set, chanting a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy to a melody no one had heard before and surely no one will again. How even a formidable pianist such as Steve Kuhn, her duet partner for this engagement, managed to stay with her was something of a mystery, yet there he was, providing chords for tunes that hadn't yet been written.
Jordan has played the Mill regularly during the past 25 years or so, but never in a duet setting with Kuhn. Unencumbered by walking bass lines or time-keeping drummers, she was fully liberated to experiment, take chances, strike out, try again.
Though her pitch was tentative at first, once she found her way she was unstoppable, gathering momentum, self-assurance and tonal color with each song. So even though sometimes she was trying to find her way in "Humdrum Blues," by the Chicago singer-songwriter Oscar Brown, Jr., her journey was fascinating to behold. She darted and dodged around the tune, pushed some notes sharp and others flat and otherwise practically eradicated the traditional Western scale.
By the time Jordan dug into the standard "I Remember You," she had gotten her footing, recasting an indelible melody with her ultra-suave brand of scat singing. Lesser vocalists may unleash a profusion of notes in attempting to suggest the high-flying solos of a saxophone or trumpet, but Jordan didn't waste a note. Each pitch meant something; each led inexorably into the next.
As far as scat singing was concerned, the high point arrived in a tune Jordan often returns to, the Gershwins' "Oh, Lady Be Good." Jordan delivered it, as always, in tribute to the hyper-virtuoso singer who inspired her and uncounted others, Ella Fitzgerald. But Jordan's version sounded nothing like the great Ella's, Jordan's tempo slower, her voice grainier, her approach more measured and methodical. Yet the musical depth of this work, the meaning of every wordless phrase, was worth savoring.
Then, too, Jordan decided to tell listeners what she was thinking -- in mid-song.
Fitzgerald was "the greatest scatter of all time," Jordan sang. "Nobody could scat like that."
But no one can sing like Jordan either. She proved it with elongated lines and unusual phrasings in "All or Nothing at All," perhaps sung as homage to this year's Frank Sinatra centennial (he made a personal anthem of the song). Jordan similarly transformed "It's You or No One," which became a platform for prolific vocal improvisation.
Between songs, she told the crowd that she hoped to make a duet recording with Kuhn. Judging by this performance, it could be a classic.
Sheila Jordan and Steve Kuhn play at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Green Mill Jazz Club, 4802 N. Broadway; $15; 773-878-5552 or greenmilljazz.com.
hreich@tribune.com
Twitter @howardreich
