Ernestine Anderson obituary

The jazz and blues vocalist Ernestine Anderson, who has died aged 87, had all the credentials for enduring success. She could handle earthy blues and sophisticated ballads with equal facility, could improvise like a jazz musician, and her honeyed sound with its churchy overtones was always a compelling listen. In a six-decade career, she made more than 30 albums, was nominated four times for Grammys, and was garlanded with accolades and awards from her home town of Seattle, whose mayor called her “Seattle’s ambassador to the world”.

Her big breakthrough came in 1958 with the release in the US of the album Hot Cargo, with the bandleader Harry Arnold. It was so popular that she was featured on the cover of Time magazine, appeared at the initial Monterey jazz festival in 1958, won the New Star award in Down Beat magazine’s Critics Poll of 1959, and signed up with Mercury Records, with whom she released half a dozen albums.

Although her fame had begun to fade by the mid-1960s, Anderson got a second wind in the mid-70s, when she was signed to Concord Records. Her subsequent appearance at the 1976 Concord jazz festival caused a sensation, and 15 more albums followed, two attracting Grammy nominations, all made with the leading jazz talents of the day, including the British pianist George Shearing. There were appearances at the Kennedy Centre and Carnegie Hall in New York, festival engagements in Japan and South America, and a wonderful European tour in 1985 with the Philip Morris Super Band. By 1993 she had resettled in Seattle, where she continued to release new material through Quincy Jones’s Qwest label, leading to two further Grammy nominations.

Anderson was born in Houston, Texas, to Erma, a housewife, and Joseph, a construction worker who sang bass in a gospel quartet. She soaked up the music as she followed her father around local churches, and at the age of 12 was entered into a local talent contest by her aunt, winning a weekly engagement with the trumpeter Russell Jacquet’s big band at Houston’s El Dorado ballroom.

Anxious to keep their daughter’s school work on track, her parents moved to Seattle in 1944 for a quieter life – only to find that the city was in its jazz and swing heyday with scores of clubs on the go. Anderson soon found her feet among the local jazz talents, most notably with the Bumps Blackwell Junior Band – with whom the young Jones was playing trumpet – and informed her parents that she would be going on the road when she was 18. This she did with the bandleader Johnny Otis, who was then fronting a 17-piece orchestra with whom Anderson toured for several months, staying on in Los Angeles when Otis disbanded. It was an Otis bandsman who advised her to sing less like Sarah Vaughan and to start sounding more like herself. She took heed, listening to Charlie Parker to get a handle on bebop phrasing.

In 1952 Anderson had a successful audition with the Lionel Hampton big band, which featured Jones in the trumpet section and other Seattle-ites in the personnel. She spent 15 months on the road with them, including a performance for Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential inauguration, but opted out of a proposed European tour in 1953 when dates and cash seemed hard to pin down, choosing instead to retreat to New York.

She had two difficult years in the city, but appeared on the altoist Gigi Gryce’s 1955 album Nica’s Tempo, and then set off with the trumpeter Rolf Ericson to tour Sweden for three months. It was while she was out there that she recorded Hot Cargo (also known as It’s Time for Ernestine). Despite the album’s subsequent popularity it initially had little support in her native country, and it took an intervention from the San Francisco critic Ralph Gleason to even get it released in the US.

Once the record was out, however, Anderson became hugely busy, playing the top clubs and moving back and forth to Los Angeles from her base in New York, where she had two apartments. Even so her career began to suffer as rock music and the British invasion swamped the US. In a reversal of the trend, she made for London, settling there from 1964 to 1966 and appearing at Ronnie Scott’s in London and at Manchester’s Club 43. An eponymous album followed in 1967 – with the Johnny Scott Orchestra for Columbia – but on her return to the US there was no work in sight, and she fell into depression. A long performing hiatus followed; she took on day jobs and essentially left music alone. Time magazine had once called her “the best-kept jazz secret in the land” and it was the sense of talent denied that seemed to have undermined her confidence.

After a decade of inactivity, Anderson became a Buddhist and began to turn things around. In 1975 a friend persuaded her to sing at a jazz weekend on Vancouver Island in Canada, where she was seen by the bassist Ray Brown, who offered to become her manager and took her career in hand. Brown persuaded Concord Records to sign Anderson, and after her fabled appearance at the Concord festival she became more popular even than she had been first time around, her bluesy sound praised by Jones as like “honey at dusk”.

Even in Anderson’s later years she continued to appear occasionally in New York, where I heard her in her 80th year at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, frail but still singing tastefully with a real jazz spirit alongside Houston Person’s smoky tenor saxophone.

Her final few years were blighted by financial insecurities and Alzheimer’s, which forced her into a care home. Even before her memory loss, Anderson was always highly evasive about her personal life. She had a long-term relationship with the jazz trumpeter Art Farmer, with whom she lived for some time, and occasionally claimed to reporters that she had been married three times, though she would never say to whom. She is survived by her daughters Shelley and Yvonne, by her son Michael, and by eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.