Jazz singer known for his association with Annie Ross

Born: September 16 1921;

Died: November 22 2017

JON Hendricks, who has died aged 96, was a jazz singer and the "James Joyce of Jive". A pre-teen Hendricks, already a singing sensation in his home town of Toledo, Ohio, was once asked to play the black “shadow” of a white bandleader. Decades on, virtually all jazz singing, male and female, works in Jon Hendricks’s shadow.

Perhaps his best known association was with fellow singers Dave Lambert and the Scottish jazz singer Annie Ross. Lambert, Hendricks & Ross were pioneers of a style known as “vocalese”, also associated with Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure, which put words to famous jazz instrumental solos.

Their rapid articulation and close harmony, plus an instinct for showmanship – in which Hendricks chivalrously conceded first place to Ross, whose parents were Scots music hall stars – made them a huge success in the late 1950s, winning accolades as the world’s leading vocal group. They were also recording pioneers; the hit album Sing A Song Of Basie was one of the first to utilise overdubbing.

Jon Hendricks, pictured with Annie Ross, was born John Carl Hendricks was born in Newark, Ohio, on September 16 1921. The family shortly thereafter moved to Toledo, where his father was appointed as African Methodist Episcopal pastor.

A precocious singer, Hendricks became known on the Toledo scene and was apparently encouraged by saxophonist Charlie Parker to consider music, rather than law, as a career. He credited an ability to write and sing complex lyrics fast and accurately to an early training on drums, but he took from his father an instinctive facility with words that was also evident in his conversation, which was mercurial, allusive and rhythmic, with some of the cadences of a preacher.

“I know everyone says this”, he told a British journalist, “but I learned a lot of what I do from the church”.

Moving to New York, he worked for a time with Dave Lambert, whose Singers had provided vocal backings for Charlie Parker, before teaming up with Lambert and Ross as a trio. Hendricks naturally became the group’s lyricist, writing words not just for the melody line, but also for some of the most celebrated instrumental solos in recorded jazz that have influenced three generations of singer-songwriters since. So various and flexible was Hendricks’s own vocal ability that in 1966 he recorded Fire In The City with a group then known as the Warlocks, shortly to become the Grateful Dead.

LH&R continued for six years, including a short period when the ailing and addicted Ross was briefly replaced by Carole Sloan and Yolande Bavan. When the group split and his first marriage was dissolved, Hendricks moved to London with his family and became a fixture on the British jazz scene and a regular television guest.

He returned to the US when his children’s education was complete and became a jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as a university tutor. He subsequently became a professor of jazz studies at the University of Toledo and was a guest lecturer at the Sorbonne, the first jazz musician to be so invited.

Hendricks continued to record on occasion, but it was his gift for writing and collaboration that kept him in the public eye. His stage piece Evolution of the Blues ran for five years in San Francisco. He recorded with Manhattan Transfer, a latter-day LH&R, and their 1985 album Vocalese won seven Grammys.

Five years later, his own Freddy Freeloader album brought together some of the best of the younger generation in jazz as Hendricks paid tribute to the jazz composers (Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis prominent among them) who had influenced him.

In 2003, he toured with Kurt Elling, Mark Murphy and Kevin Mahogany; they called themselves (with a certain sense of irony, given that Elling and Murphy are white and that Hendricks was old enough to be Mahogany’s grandfather) “Four Brothers”; the name actually came from the first song he recorded with the Dave Lambert Singers. A wag described the latter-day supergroup as the “Travelling Wilburys of vocalese”.

Hendricks’ last years were devoted to guest appearances, though he also formed a family group with his second wife Judith and children Michelle and Eric, which also featured Bobby McFerrin, perhaps the most celebrated of his vocal disciples. In his last years, Hendricks was still revisiting some of the highlights of the recorded jazz canon.

A full lyric version of Miles Davis’s epochal Miles Ahead was performed in New York by UK choir London Vocal Project and is to be recorded.

Arguably the greatest jazz singer of all, Hendricks remained a modest man, generous with his time and knowledge, largely unimpressed by fame, and committed lifelong to what he called the “truth” of singing.

BRIAN MORTON