Ernestine Anderson

Ernestine Irene Anderson was an American jazz and blues singer born on November 11, 1928, in Houston, Texas, alongside her twin sister Josephine. Her father, Joseph, worked in construction and sang bass in a gospel quartet, while her mother, Erma, was a housewife. Both of her grandparents sang in a Baptist church choir, and Anderson was surrounded by music from an early age, developing a fondness for blues recordings by artists such as Bessie Smith by the time she was three years old. She also sang solos in her local church gospel choir. At twelve, her godmother entered her in a talent contest where, unable to match the piano player's key, Anderson improvised around the melody — an experience that led a musician in the audience to identify her as a jazz singer.

In 1944, when Anderson was sixteen, her family relocated to Seattle, Washington, where she attended Garfield High School and graduated in 1946. As a teenager she was discovered by bandleader Bumps Blackwell, who brought her on as a vocalist for his Junior Band. The group performed regularly at jazz clubs along Seattle's Jackson Street, with its lineup eventually including Quincy Jones on trumpet and Ray Charles on keyboard. Anderson made her performance debut with the band at the Washington Social Club on East Madison Street. At eighteen she left Seattle to spend a year touring with the Johnny Otis band, and in 1952 she joined Lionel Hampton's orchestra for a year on the road before settling in New York City.

Her appearance on trumpeter Gigi Gryce's 1955 album Nica's Tempo on Savoy Records led to a three-month Scandinavian tour with trumpeter Rolf Ericson. During that period she recorded her debut album in Sweden, which was subsequently released in the United States by Mercury Records under the title Hot Cargo in 1958. Jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason promoted the record on his radio program and in his nationally syndicated San Francisco Chronicle column, generating significant attention for Anderson. The following year she won the DownBeat New Star Award and continued recording for Mercury. A 1958 Time magazine article described her, at twenty-nine, as perhaps the best-kept jazz secret in the country. Through the mid-1960s she divided her time between the United States and Europe, spending time in London during a period when rock and roll had diminished opportunities for jazz performers in America.

Anderson's career regained major momentum following a celebrated appearance at the 1976 Concord Jazz Festival, after which she recorded nearly twenty albums for Concord Records over the next seventeen years. Two of those records — Never Make Your Move Too Soon in 1981 and Big City in 1983 — earned Grammy Award nominations for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. A series of concert dates in Japan resulted in the release of a four-disc live set in 1988, the same year she made her debut at Carnegie Hall. She also performed at the Hollywood Bowl, at the Women in Jazz event at the Kennedy Center in 1999, and at the Monterey Jazz Festival on six occasions spanning 1959 through 2007, as well as at festivals in New Orleans, Brazil, Berlin, and Austria, among many other international venues.

After departing Concord Records in 1993, Anderson signed with Qwest Records, the label founded by her former Garfield High School classmate Quincy Jones. The label released two of her albums — Now and Then in 1993 and Blues, Dues and Love News in 1996 — both of which received Grammy nominations, bringing her total Grammy nominations to four across her career. She subsequently recorded for Koch International, releasing Isn't It Romantic in 1998, and in 2003 her HighNote label release Love Makes the Changes earned further recognition. Over the course of her career she recorded more than thirty albums.

Among her honors, Anderson was one of seventy-five women selected for the 1999 book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America, photographed by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Brian Lanker. She received the Golden Umbrella award at Seattle's Bumbershoot arts festival in 2002, and in 2004 the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Recording Academy presented her with its IMPACT Award. In 2012, the Low Income Housing Institute named a housing development the Ernestine Anderson Place in recognition of her long residence in Seattle's Central District. A follower of Nichiren Buddhism, Anderson died on March 10, 2016, in Shoreline, Washington, at the age of eighty-seven.

Anderson also had a presence on Broadway, appearing in the musical Murder at the Vanities in 1933.