Search - Sheila Jordan, Cameron Brown :: I've Grown Accustomed to the Bass

Sheila Jordan has had years of experience singing with just bass accompaniment, and she's done it with some of the best, from an impromptu beginning with Charles Mingus in 1955 through work with Steve Swallow and Arild Andersen to a 15-year association with Harvie Swartz. She first approached Cameron Brown as a possible collaborator in the 1970s (a fact she manages to sing on "The Very Thought of You"), but they never performed in duet until this set, recorded in Bruges, Belgium, in 1997, when Jordan was touring with Brown's group. Jordan is the bravest--and likely the most musically creative--of jazz singers, not just for singing with minimal accompaniment, but for her incredible spontaneity, sometimes improvising rhyming lyrics as well as musical lines, testing musical boundaries as well as her own range. Here the spontaneity extends to autobiographical lyrics about "my ex-husband Duke Jordan" and bemused efforts to engage the audience in a sing-along on Charlie Parker's "Quasimodo." The centerpiece is a half-hour medley that pays tribute to Bird, Mingus, Monk, Lester Young, and Billie Holiday, and Brown is with Jordan all the way. He has all the cardinal virtues--solid time and intonation, a big sound, the ability to pick just the right note--and he manages to define the formal essence of this music. This is a performance rich in reference to a long life lived in jazz, animated by equal parts wit and love, by a vocalist who has never stopped testing just what being a jazz singer might really mean. --Stuart Broomer