Commentators were not always in perfect accord when it came to the talents of the singer Chris Connor, who has died of cancer, aged 81. To some, she was just a husky-voiced performer of standard songs who could swing a tune. To others she was a jazz singer through and through, with a musician's ear for interesting harmonic choices. The influential John S Wilson deprecated "her hoarse, flat manner" (although he recanted later) and Martin Williams questioned her "expressive range" even as one of her employers, the bandleader Stan Kenton, rated her "one of the great song stylists of the day" and the composer Gunther Schuller spoke of her "emotional intensity".
Connor had set out to emulate two prominent vocalists, Anita O'Day and June Christy, both associated with the Kenton band, and achieved a personal objective when she toured with Kenton in 1952. She, like Christy, employed the vibrato-less linear style, becoming one of the leading exponents of 1950s vocal "cool". Jazz musicians liked her approach and the way it chimed with the mood of the day, leading to a clutch of albums that were lauded at the time and often reissued. Yet for all her success on record and in clubs, Connor was usually cast as the plucky bronze medallist in a race dominated by O'Day and Christy.
She was born Mary Loutsenhizer in Kansas City, Missouri, then a hotbed of jazz activity, where her father was a telegrapher for Western Union. He took her to many live jazz performances. According to her family, she set her sights on a vocal career from the age of six. At high school, she was first clarinet in the school band and played the instrument for eight years, becoming a confident sight-reader. "Playing the clarinet trained me in the basics of breath control, which is very important for singing," she said. She also haunted the local record shop, listening to Peggy Lee, an obvious influence, as well as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, saying: "I listened hard, not just to the melodies but to the words and the phrasing. Sinatra's phrasing was the best."
Working as a secretary in nearby Jefferson City, Chris Connor (as she had begun to call herself) sang with a student orchestra for weekend campus dances at the University of Missouri. Led by the music director Paul Cherches, the band used stock arrangements of Kenton tunes, this experience only intensifying Connor's desire to sing with Kenton. "It gave me the spark and confidence to sing professionally," she said, emphasising that she had had no formal vocal training.
In 1949, Connor moved to New York, auditioned successfully for the bandleader Claude Thornhill and was accepted as a member of the Snowflakes, the band's singing group, soon becoming the lead vocalist. She left Thornhill to join the clarinettist Jerry Wald's jazz group in 1962 and was overheard by Christy when the Wald band made a live broadcast from a New Orleans club.
Christy, who was about to leave Kenton, recommended Connor to him and, a phone call later, Connor had achieved her dream. She was with Kenton for 10 months, recording her biggest hit, All About Ronnie, in 1953. However, exhausted by non-stop touring, she stepped down to undertake a solo career. Already successful on record with Wald and Kenton, she was first contracted to Bethlehem Records. Her album with the pianist Ellis Larkins was much applauded, and she later moved over to Atlantic, one of only a handful of white performers to do so, making the charts in 1956 with the title track from the album I Miss You So and in 1957 with Trust in Me.
A later contract with Roulette teamed her with the excitable trumpeter Maynard Ferguson for Two's Company, her control and even-paced, honeyed sound at its best in this hard-swinging context. However, Connor's career ran into the sand in the 1970s as she struggled with alcoholism and changing musical tastes.
Like many classic US performers, she did find something of a safe haven in Japan, which she visited regularly. Her comeback continued in the 1980s, when jazz singing again became popular, recording for Contemporary and Alfa, a Japanese label, supported by the veteran pianist Hank Jones. Her album My Funny Valentine was arranged by Richard Rodney Bennett, and an Audiophile recording, The London Collection, dates from a 1990 Pizza on the Park performance.
Yet more albums followed on HighNote and the Japanese King label, and her recent appearances at New York's Iridium club earned rave reviews, the lower pitch of her voice, her still commanding stage presence and musicality prompting Larry Kart, the Chicago Tribune critic, to call her "a dominating vocal presence whose music is full of hard-earned wisdom and truth".
Connor is survived by her companion and manager Lori Muscarelle.