Featuring Sheila Jordan and Cameron Brown

Student tickets also avaiable at $18.00

Experience an unforgettable performance with Sheila Jordan, a true iconic vocal jazz figure, along with Cameron Brown, one of the finest bassists on the current jazz scene.

Sheila Jordan - Voice

Sheila Jordan has been hailed by Scott Yanow in the All Music guide as "one of the most consistently creative of all jazz singers." Starting with her 1962 debut Blue Note recording Portrait of Sheila, Jordan has become an iconic jazz figure, influencing many other artists in the jazz vocal genre. She is one of the few vocalists who can improvise logical lyrics (which often rhyme), she is a superb scat singer, and is also an emotional interpreter of ballads. The New York Times raves, "Her ballad performances are simply beyond the emotional and expressive capabilities of most other vocalists."

Despite her talents, Jordan spent much of the 1960s and '70s working at a conventional day job. She studied piano when she was 11 and early on, sang vocalese in a vocal group. Jordan moved to New York in the 1950s, was married to Duke Jordan (1952-62), studied with Lennie Tristano, and worked in New York clubs. George Russell used her on an unusual recording of "You Are My Sunshine" and she became one of the few singers to lead her own Blue Note album (1962).

However, it would be a decade before she appeared on records again, working with Carla Bley, Roswell Rudd, and co-leading a group with Steve Kuhn in the late '70s. Jordan recorded a memorable duet album with bassist Arild Andersen for SteepleChase in 1977, and teamed up with bassist Harvie Swartz for 17 years.

By the 1980s, Sheila Jordan was finally performing jazz on a full-time basis and gaining the recognition she deserved 20 years earlier. She recorded as a leader (in addition to the Blue Note session) for East Wind, Grapevine, SteepleChase, Palo Alto, Blackhawk, and Muse, resurfacing in 1999 with Jazz Child. Sheila Jordan has recorded 9 projects since that time including “Believe in Jazz (2004) and Winter Sunshine (2008)

Entirely non-derivative, Jordan is one of only a tiny handful of jazz singers who fully deserve the appellation and for whom no other term will do. Sheila Jordan was presented the 2008 Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award for her lifetime of service to jazz at the 13th Annual Women In Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. on May 16, 2008

Cameron Brown - Bass

Jazz bassist, composer and educator Cameron Brown began his career in the mid-sixties, recording in Europe with George Russell and Don Cherry. These two wonderful musicians remain life-long influences and inspirations.

Mr. Brown anchored some of the most important groups of the seventies, eighties and nineties, beginning in 1975. Sheila Jordan, Roswell Rudd, Archie Shepp and Beaver Harris were his mentors and bandleaders then. He has enjoyed special relationships with master drummers: Art Blakey, Dannie Richmond, Philly Joe Jones, Edward Blackwell, Idris Muhammad and Joe Chambers, as well as Mr. Harris.

The Don Pullen/George Adams Quartet, featuring Dannie Richmond, developed into an intense and rewarding partnership which lasted nearly ten years. In addition to this quartet, Beaver Harris’s 360 Degree Music Experience, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the Sextet and Big Bands of George Russell, and various groups led be Mr. Shepp, Mr. Cherry, Mr. Rudd and Mr. Richmond, Mr. Brown has performed and/or recorded with Donald Byrd, Booker Ervin, Ted Curson, Lee Konitz, Chet Baker, Terumasa Hino, Betty Carter and the John Hicks Trio, Houston Person, Etta Jones and Jane Ira Bloom.

He’s helped young people around the world to nurture their interest in and passion for jazz from North Carolina to Norway, from Helsinki to New York, to Hong Kong and Taiwan. He is on the faculty of the New School University and has taught at the summer workshop near Venice, Italy co-sponsored by the Manhattan School of Music.

At present, in addition to freelance work, Mr. Brown performs and/or records with Joe Lovano, Sheila Jordan, Archie Shepp, Dave Ballou, Dewey Redman, Lou Donaldson, Marc Copland, Jim McNeely, Steve Slagle, George Cables, Joe Locke, Salvatore Bonafede, Tony Malaby and Phil Markowitz as well as his own ensemble, Cameron Brown and the Hear and Now. He has appeared on more than 80 recordings.

His first recording as a leader, after nearly 40 years of performing, is with his group The Hear and Now and is entitled Here and How! on the OmniTone record label.

The Jordan/Brown- Voice/Bass Duo Program

Jordan has been a pioneer of the bass/voice sound since she first worked with Steve Swallow in the mid-'50s. She also recorded an album, Sheila, with Arild Andersen, in the 1970s for Steeplechase Records. She had a long collaboration with Harvie Swartz for 17 years and then with Cameron Brown. She has recorded bass-voice duos with Arild Andersen on Sheila (1977), Harvie Schwartz on Old Time Feeling (1982) and with Cameron Brown on I’ve Grown Accustomed to the Bass (2000), and Celebration-Live at the Triad (2004) . "I always gravitate toward the bass," she says. "It's my favorite instrument. My voice is more suited to the bass than any of the other instruments. There are ranges in my voice that I can't sing with a full rhythm section sometimes. There are delicate parts of my voice that for some reason I can't hear or feel all the time when I'm with a full rhythm section."

"It takes a lot of work to make the bass and voice interesting, without having everything sound the same," says Jordan, "and not missing the drums and piano. We work very hard at trying to make the material interesting, without making it sound the same way all the time. It's very open, and it's free."

Brown's personal rapport with Jordan is another, more obvious factor in the duo's success. The two met in 1974 and have performed together in other group settings, but the merger as a duo is especially exciting for Brown.

"For me personally, on a lot of different levels, it's a huge thrill," he said. "The thing about Sheila is that she goes back to a very personal relationship with Charlie Parker, as well as a profound musical relationship with Charlie Parker. Playing with Dannie (Richmond), I got to sort of have a bridge to Mingus. Playing with Sheila, I feel like a have a more authentic bridge to Bird. It's so exciting. She has absorbed so much of his tradition. A lot of the tunes that she sings are songs that Bird played. We do 'If I Should Lose You,' for example, which is a song that Bird played. Your have the lyric and the meaning of the song, but you also have the scatting and the thing that Bird brought to that music, improvisationally."

Jordan's singing style is unique and more closely related to the phrasing of horns than it is to more conventional crooners. "She feels like she was more influenced by horn players, in terms of the way she phrases," he explained. "Even though she's absolutely singing the song and delivering the lyric and thinking about the lyric, the way she does it is coming more from the way horn players played, rather than the way other singers might have done it."

Tickets are available on-line now Note: Dinner is at 7:30 Music is at 8:30