Ernestine Anderson, an internationally acclaimed jazz singer who earned four Grammy nominations during a six-decade career, including a successful comeback in her 50s, died March 10 at a nursing home near Seattle. She was 87.
The King County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed the death. The cause was not reported.
In a career of more than 60 years, Ms. Anderson performed all over the world, from the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall to festivals in South America, Japan and Europe. She toured widely and sang with bands led by R&B singer Johnny Otis and jazz star Lionel Hampton. She performed at the presidential inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower
Childhood friend and producer Quincy Jones once described her voice as the sound of “honey at dusk.”
Ms. Anderson had a bluesy style of singing best demonstrated in her signature tune, the sassy and suggestive “Never Make Your Move Too Soon,” which she recorded on a Grammy-nominated 1981 album of the same name.
She found some early success as a teenage singer with Otis’s band in the 1940s and made several recordings that never quite took off. She recorded her first single “K.C. Lover/Good Lovin’ Babe” in 1948, the year she married for the first time.
Frustrated with her slow career growth in New York in the 1950s, she joined Swedish bandleader Rolf Ericson on a European tour. While there, she recorded an album, “Hot Cargo,” which was released by Mercury Records in 1958 to rave reviews.
She performed at the first Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958, the same year Time magazine called Ms. Anderson “the best-kept jazz secret in the land.” Critics at Down Beat magazine celebrated her as a “new star” of the year.
She released six albums on Mercury Records, including the much-praised “Moanin’,” but her career stalled in the 1960s. In 1966, she returned to Seattle and quit singing altogether, working as a hotel maid and for a telephone answering service.
She was coaxed back to singing in the mid-1970s and in 1976 released the album “Hello, Like Before,” the first of a dozen for the Concord Jazz label. Ms. Anderson continued to tour widely, as her career continued to blossom into her 80s.
Ernestine Anderson was born Nov. 11, 1928, in Houston and moved with her family to Seattle in 1944.
She alternately made her base in Seattle, Los Angeles and New York through the 1950s, working with such acclaimed musicians as Jones, Hampton, saxophonist Gigi Gryce and trumpeter Art Farmer, with whom she was romantically linked for a time.
According to the Seattle Times, survivors include three children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
