Persistence Finally Pays Off for Longtime Singer

Persistence is finally paying off for singer Sheila Jordan, who is in the middle of a five-night stand at Elario’s.

Jordan, 61, has been singing jazz seriously since the early 1950s. She made her first album in 1953, but until 1987 she worked full-time at assorted office jobs to support herself.

“Then I got laid off from my job at an advertising agency,” she said. “I could have stayed and done another menial job, but they offered me a year’s severance pay, and I figured maybe it was time to sing full time. I had more time to relax when I had an office job.”

Although Jordan gets offered more live dates than she can handle, her recording career was on hold for five years before the release of “Lost and Found,” her fifth American album.

The project was the culmination of a lengthy courtship with Joe Fields, owner of Muse Records, who had wanted to record Jordan for years.

“I guess maybe I was waiting for a bigger company,” Jordan said when asked why she didn’t take him up on his offer sooner. “I guess I was waiting for Blue Note to offer me a deal again. I did my first album (‘Portrait of Sheila’) for them in 1963. It was just reissued on CD.”

Jordan is one of jazz’s under-appreciated heroes. Her voice is a facile instrument that holds its own with the best. It reminds you of Betty Carter’s: sliding sensuously from note to note, ranging from pure highs to throaty lows, stretching words over several notes. Jordan improvises with the ease of the best saxophonists and pianists.

Two of her primary influences were Charlie Parker and Billie Holliday, and she includes many of their signature tunes in her repertoire, such as Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Anthropology,” from her new album.

Jordan grew up in Summer Hill, Pa., and moved to Detroit for high school. During her teen years, she hung out in clubs with fellow Detroiters such as Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris and Kenny Burrell. She moved to New York in 1952. During the 1960s, club work dried up, and she sang jazz liturgies in churches, but she returned to clubs in the 1970s and 1980s.

At Elario’s, Jordan will be backed by locals Bob Magnusson on bass, Jim Plank on drums and Randy Porter on piano. Jordan loves duets with bass players, such as her collaborations with Harvie Swartz. She has never played in San Diego or with these musicians before, but she hopes to team up with Magnusson on some of her favorite bass/vocal numbers.

Show times at Elario’s are 9, 10:30 and midnight tonight and 8:30 and 10:30 Sunday night.

John Archer, half of the local band Checkfield, has had enough of San Diego. He moved to Omaha, Neb., in August.

“I was fed up with the whole deal, the quality of life--it’s not a place to raise a family,” said Archer, whose wife is due with their first child in March.

In Omaha, Archer parlayed his ongoing producing duties with American Gramaphone, Checkfield’s label, into a contract for his services. In the past, Archer has brought the label such new talent as San Diegan Spencer Nilsen.

Archer said he plans to continue playing and recording with San Diegan Ron Satterfield, his partner in Checkfield.

“With computers, modems, Federal Express and telephones, there’s no reason you can’t work cross-country,” he said.

The group’s newest album, “A View from the Edge,” released last April, is doing well. Archer expects it to top 50,000 in sales.

Archer is surprised at the songs played most often on commercial radio.

“On ‘The Wave’ and contemporary jazz formats, the vocal tunes did OK, but instrumentals like ‘Washington’ and ‘Slow Dancing’ did as well as vocals,” Archer said.

KIFM (98.1) in San Diego has taken a special liking to the tune “Conjuring,” which features scat lines sung by Satterfield.

Checkfield made its live performing debut last October at Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay and the Catalina Jazz Festival.

As for Omaha, the temperature was 0 degrees one day last week, but Archer was happy.

“Property prices are wonderful. People are incredibly friendly. After you’ve been on the coast awhile, you forget what a real close-knit, friendly town is like. As for things to do, I haven’t found anything I’ve wanted to do that I haven’t been able to do here.”

Del Mar photographer H. Montgomery-Drysdale’s black-and-white photos of jazz greats are part of an exhibit of her work at the Gallery in Palm Desert through mid-January. Montgomery-Drysdale, 60, first heard Louis Armstrong while on a date at Yale in the 1950s, and the photos she took of the trumpeter at his 70th birthday concert in Los Angeles in 1970 got her started photographing jazz greats. Among her subsequent subjects: Herb Ellis, Lionel Hampton, Red Callender, Ethel Waters, Barney Kessel, Anita O’Day, Sarah Vaughan, and San Diegans John Best and Bobby Gordon.

RIFFS: Dutch vocalist Greetje Kauffeld has begun a month of singing concerts and performs tonight at 8 at All That Jazz in Rancho Bernardo. There’s a $10 cover charge. . . .

San Diego bassist Glen Fisher teams up with guitarist Peter Sprague and drummer Danny Campbell on Tuesday nights, through January, beginning Tuesday at the Salmon House restaurant on Mission Bay. Music starts at 8:30. . . .