For some listeners, the voice is the most direct way into jazz. A great instrumental solo can be thrilling, but a singer gives the music words, character and a human point of view: Billie Holiday stretching a lyric until it hurts, Ella Fitzgerald turning it into a display of impossible swing, or Cécile McLorin Salvant finding a new drama in a song that has been sung for a century.
This list is not simply a roll call of the greatest jazz singers. It is about complete albums: records where a distinctive voice meets the right repertoire, band, arranger and moment in time.
You will find American songbook landmarks, Brazilian classics, blues-rooted records and a few crossover albums that brought jazz singing to a far wider audience.
From Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald to Samara Joy and Laufey, these are 50 vocal jazz albums that reward repeat listening, whether you know every standard already or are looking for the best place to begin.
They’re listed in chronological order, starting in the mid-1950s.
1. Chet Baker – Chet Baker Sings (1954)
Baker was already known as a trumpeter with a James Dean profile when Pacific Jazz put him in front of a microphone. Backed by pianist Russ Freeman’s trio, he sang in a thin, untrained voice pitched almost as high as his trumpet, with none of the vibrato or dramatics singers were supposed to bring to a ballad.
That plainness is the point. His “My Funny Valentine,” delivered almost flat and half-asleep, became the version other singers still measure themselves against, and the record set the template for an entire strand of cool, undemonstrative jazz singing that runs through to Norah Jones and beyond.
2. Helen Merrill – Helen Merrill (1955)
Recorded over three days in December 1954 at Fine Sound Studios in New York, this was Merrill’s debut, arranged and conducted by a 21-year-old Quincy Jones.
Clifford Brown’s trumpet is the record’s other lead voice, trading phrases with Merrill on “‘S Wonderful” and shadowing her breathy, unhurried reading of “What’s New?” Brown would be dead within eighteen months, killed in a car accident, which lends the sessions a retrospective weight neither musician could have known about.
Merrill’s whispery intimacy was unusual for the period, and the record still sounds like a quiet outlier among the brasher vocal albums of the mid-1950s.
3. Sarah Vaughan – Sarah Vaughan (1955)
Vaughan recorded this with Clifford Brown just days after his sessions with Helen Merrill, backed by a sextet that also included Herbie Mann on flute and Paul Quinichette on tenor. Where Merrill worked in half-tones, Vaughan used the full range of an instrument critics routinely compared to an opera voice, sliding through registers on “Lullaby of Birdland” with an ease that turned a fairly slight tune into a showcase.
It’s one of several outstanding records Vaughan made in the mid-1950s, but the pairing with Brown, cut short by his death the following year, gives this one particular standing among collectors.
4. Ella Fitzgerald – Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book (1956)
Norman Granz built his new label, Verve, partly around this project: a two-volume, 32-song survey of a single songwriter’s catalogue, arranged by a 26-year-old Buddy Bregman. It was a commercial gamble in 1956, when singles still drove sales, but it worked, and it set off the format Fitzgerald would repeat with Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Gershwin and others across the rest of the decade.
Her diction and rhythmic precision on songs like “Night and Day” and “Anything Goes” did as much as any single record to establish the American songbook as a body of work worth taking seriously, rather than disposable pop.
5. Frank Sinatra – Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956)
Arranger Nelson Riddle and Sinatra had already found their footing on In the Wee Small Hours, but this is the record where the partnership turned confident swing into something like a signature sound.
“I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” built around a Riddle arrangement that builds through a trombone solo into a full-band climax, became one of the most imitated arrangements in popular music. The album made history of its own too: when the UK album chart launched later that decade, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! became its first-ever number one.
6. Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong – Ella and Louis (1956)
Granz paired his two biggest stars with a rhythm section led by Oscar Peterson and put them in a room with a stack of standards and almost no rehearsal. The chemistry is audible: Armstrong’s gravel against Fitzgerald’s clarity on “Can’t We Be Friends?” and “Isn’t This a Lovely Day” sounds like two old friends catching up rather than a staged event.
It remains the most fully realised of their several collaborations, and an entry point that has converted plenty of non-jazz listeners into fans of both singers.
7. Nat King Cole – After Midnight (1957)
By 1957, Cole had spent most of the decade as a pop crooner backed by string orchestras, so After Midnight was something of a homecoming. He returned to the small-group format that made his name in the 1940s, fronting his trio plus a rotating cast of guest soloists, including violinist Stuff Smith, trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, altoist Willie Smith and trombonist Juan Tizol.
Cole’s piano playing gets almost as much space as his singing, and the loose, after-hours feel of the record is a reminder that before he was one of the best-selling vocalists in America, he was one of its best jazz pianists.
8. Lambert, Hendricks & Ross – Sing a Song of Basie (1958)
Vocalese, the technique of setting lyrics to note-for-note transcriptions of recorded instrumental solos, existed before this record, but Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross took it somewhere new.
Recorded in 1957 with a rhythm section of Nat Pierce, Freddie Green, Eddie Jones and Sonny Payne, and released the following year, the trio built something that sounds, through layered studio overdubbing, like a full Count Basie big band singing its own arrangements back to itself.
A contemporary review in Disc magazine called it “unusual, enterprising, controversial,” which undersold how influential the record would prove for later vocal groups working the same trick.
9. Billie Holiday – Lady in Satin (1958)
Recorded over three nights in February 1958, a little over a year before Holiday’s death, this is a hard record to listen to without knowing the context, and also one that doesn’t need the context to land. Conductor Ray Ellis wrapped her voice in strings, harp and a large orchestra at her own request, telling producer Irving Townsend she wanted “a pretty album, something delicate.”
Her voice by this point had frayed and narrowed, and pianist Mal Waldron worked closely with her through the sessions to get performances that are ragged in places and devastating throughout. Whether it’s heard as a last masterpiece or a document of decline, it stays high on almost every list of essential jazz vocal records.
10. Abbey Lincoln – That’s Him! (1958)
Lincoln’s debut had leaned on lush orchestration; this one strips everything back to a working band of Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Sonny Rollins on tenor, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Max Roach on drums, the group she would marry into creatively and, in Roach’s case, personally.
The shift in setting exposed a tougher, more direct singer than her first record suggested, and pointed toward the socially engaged work she and Roach would make together in the years that followed, including the landmark We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.
11. Anita O’Day – Anita O’Day Sings the Winners (1958)
The concept, as O’Day and producer Norman Granz described it, was to record the songs voted best of the year in the major jazz and orchestral polls, split between arrangers Marty Paich and Russell Garcia. It’s a clever excuse for a set list, but the record earns its place for O’Day’s phrasing: clipped, behind the beat, and closer to a horn player’s sense of time than most singers of her generation.
Her clean, almost cool delivery on songs like “Boogie Blues” made her a clear influence on the generation of singers, Mark Murphy among them, who followed.
12. Nina Simone – Little Girl Blue (1959)
Simone’s debut for the small Bethlehem label was recorded quickly and, by her own later account, on unfavourable terms; she reportedly sold the rights for a flat fee and saw none of the royalties when “My Baby Just Cares for Me” became a surprise hit decades later after it soundtracked a Chanel No. 5 advert in the UK.
On the record itself, her classical piano training is as evident as her voice, particularly on the title track and a spare, blues-inflected reading of “Good Bait.” It’s the sound of an artist arriving fully formed, years before “jazz singer” became too narrow a label to contain what she did.
13. Dinah Washington – What a Diff’rence a Day Makes! (1959)
Washington had built her reputation in blues and R&B before Mercury arranger Belford Hendricks wrapped her voice in strings for this session. The title track, a Spanish-language pop song from the 1930s reworked into a lush ballad, crossed over into the pop top ten and won Washington a Grammy, introducing her to an audience well beyond jazz clubs.
The rest of the album balances that pop instinct with straighter jazz phrasing, and shows why she was nicknamed “Queen of the Blues” even as she moved toward the mainstream.
14. Mark Murphy – Rah (1961)
Murphy’s Riverside debut paired him with an all-star band, including trumpeter Clark Terry, trombonist Melba Liston and pianists Wynton Kelly and Bill Evans splitting duties, under arrangements by Ernie Wilkins sharp enough that critic John A. Tynan said they’d “turn Frank Sinatra green with envy.”
Murphy had written hipster vocalese lyrics for “My Favorite Things,” but Richard Rodgers vetoed them, and Riverside substituted a straighter version for the American release, leaving the original as a collector’s curiosity on Japanese pressings. Even in its censored form, the record marked Murphy’s arrival as a genuinely idiosyncratic voice in male jazz singing.
15. Nancy Wilson & Cannonball Adderley (1962)
Wilson recorded the vocal tracks with Adderley’s group in June 1961, working alongside Cannonball’s alto, Nat Adderley’s cornet and Joe Zawinul’s piano, with Sam Jones and Louis Hayes completing the rhythm section. Additional instrumental tracks without Wilson were recorded that August.
It reached number 30 on the Billboard albums chart, a rare crossover for a straight-ahead jazz vocal record at the time, and remains a model for how a singer can work as an equal member of a horn-led band rather than its featured attraction.
16. Sheila Jordan – A Portrait of Sheila (1963)
Alfred Lion signed Jordan to Blue Note after hearing her at the Page Three Club in Greenwich Village, reportedly despite the label’s unwritten policy against recording jazz vocalists. Jordan wanted the whole record to be voice-and-bass duets with Steve Swallow; Blue Note allowed it for one track, “Dat Dere,” and filled out the rest with guitarist Barry Galbraith and drummer Denzil Best.
The spareness of that arrangement let Jordan’s harmonically adventurous, conversational phrasing come through unobscured. It won her the top spot in DownBeat’s Critics Poll for talent deserving wider recognition, though she wouldn’t release another album as a leader for over a decade.
17. Stan Getz & João Gilberto – Getz/Gilberto (1964)
Produced by Creed Taylor and featuring Antônio Carlos Jobim on piano, this is the record that took bossa nova from a Brazilian and jazz-scene enthusiasm to a global pop phenomenon. João Gilberto’s wife at the time, Astrud, had never recorded professionally before Taylor asked her to sing the English lyric on “The Girl from Ipanema” almost as an afterthought; her untrained, conversational delivery became one of the most recognisable vocal performances in recorded music.
The album won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1965, the first jazz record to do so, and turned Astrud Gilberto into a star she hadn’t set out to become.
18. Astrud Gilberto – The Astrud Gilberto Album (1965)
Gilberto’s proper solo debut, recorded at RCA Studios in Hollywood in January 1965 with Creed Taylor producing and Marty Paich arranging, tried to build a full career out of the accident of “Ipanema.” Jobim plays guitar and sings on one track, and a small band including Bud Shank on flute and alto keeps the arrangements light around her unadorned voice.
The record reached number 41 on the Billboard 200, respectable for a bossa nova vocal album, and confirmed that her appeal wasn’t a fluke of one song, even if none of what followed matched Ipanema’s ubiquity.
19. Carmen McRae – The Great American Songbook (1972)
McRae recorded this live at Donte’s, a small jazz club in Los Angeles, on a single night in November 1971, backed by pianist Jimmy Rowles, guitarist Joe Pass, bassist Chuck Domanico and drummer Chuck Flores.
It captured a kind of unguarded, conversational jazz singing that was becoming rare in the studio-polished 1970s; McRae introduces songs, banters between numbers, and generally sounds like she’s playing a set rather than making a record. She called Rowles “the guy every girl singer in her right mind would like to work with,” and Diana Krall later said she regretted never having seen the show live.
20. Ella Fitzgerald & Joe Pass – Take Love Easy (1973)
By the early 1970s Fitzgerald had spent nearly two decades on Granz’s Verve label building the songbook series with full orchestras; Take Love Easy, made for his new Pablo label, went the other direction entirely, pairing her voice with nothing but Joe Pass’s guitar.
The stripped setting exposed her time and intonation in a way orchestral arrangements never had to, and Pass proved himself as sensitive an accompanist as he was a soloist. It was the first of several duo records the two would make together, and arguably still the best.
21. Al Jarreau – We Got By (1975)
After years working the folk and jazz club circuit in Los Angeles, Jarreau’s studio debut arrived fully formed, built largely from his own songs rather than standards.
His voice functioned as a one-man rhythm section as much as a lead instrument, using vocal percussion and scat lines to fill out arrangements in ways that pointed toward the fusion of jazz, soul and pop he’d spend the rest of the decade refining on records like Glow and This Time. It’s less canonical than his later Warner Bros. albums but shows where that sound started.
22. Tony Bennett & Bill Evans – The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album (1975)
Bennett and Evans recorded this for the small Fantasy label with just voice and piano, no rhythm section at all, an arrangement that put enormous weight on both musicians’ sense of time and space. Bennett, coming off a commercially difficult stretch in his career, later called the sessions among the most artistically satisfying he ever took part in, even though the record found only a modest audience on release.
The duo reconvened two years later for Together Again; between them, the two albums are still held up as a model for how a singer and a pianist can converse rather than simply accompany.
23. Betty Carter – The Audience with Betty Carter (1980)
Carter had spent years frustrated with how major labels handled her music, so she recorded this sprawling double live album at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall and released it herself, on her own Bet-Car Records, with pianist John Hicks, bassist Curtis Lundy and drummer Kenny Washington.
It opens with a 25-minute reworking of “Sounds (Movin’ On)” that shows off the harmonic risk-taking and scat improvisation that made other singers, and plenty of musicians, treat her as a serious artist rather than a crowd-pleaser. The Penguin Guide to Jazz gave it one of its rare “crown” ratings, and jazz historian Stuart Nicholson has called it the strongest evidence on record of Carter’s standing among the greatest jazz singers.
24. Bobby McFerrin – The Voice (1984)
McFerrin recorded this entire album solo, with no accompaniment, no overdubs and no instruments beyond his own vocal cords, using breath control and technique, including singing while inhaling, to suggest bass lines, drum patterns and horn parts within a single continuous performance. It was, by most accounts, the first jazz vocal record made this way, arriving at a moment when synthesizers and drum machines were reshaping popular music in the opposite direction.
DownBeat named him best male vocalist in both 1984 and 1985, and the record’s success paved the way for the looser, more theatrical solo performances he became known for afterward, including “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” a few years later.
25. Shirley Horn – Softly (1988)
Horn’s only release for the small Audiophile label, recorded in October 1987 with her longtime trio of bassist Charles Ables and drummer Steve Williams, is a good example of the extremely slow tempos and long silences that became her signature. Where most singers of standards aim for warmth through momentum, Horn found it by stripping momentum away almost entirely, letting a lyric’s meaning surface in the space between notes.
It’s a quieter, less celebrated record than the Verve albums that would follow in the 1990s, but it shows the patience that made those later records possible.
26. Natalie Cole – Unforgettable… with Love (1991)
Cole’s tribute to her father, Nat King Cole, who died when she was 15, drew on the same arrangers who had worked with him decades earlier, including Nelson Riddle, Johnny Mandel and Marty Paich, plus Michel Legrand and Bill Holman, with her uncle Ike Cole playing piano on the sessions.
The title track’s technical trick, a newly recorded vocal from Natalie layered against an isolated vocal track from her father’s original 1951 recording, turned into one of the most talked-about duets in pop history and swept the 1992 Grammys, including Album of the Year. It sold more than seven million copies in the US alone, an almost unheard-of number for a jazz-adjacent record.
27. Shirley Horn – Here’s to Life (1992)
Horn’s major-label breakthrough came at 58, arranged and conducted by Johnny Mandel with a full string orchestra wrapped around her voice and piano.
Where Softly had been all space and restraint, this record let the strings do some of the emotional work that Horn’s phrasing had always done alone, and it became her best-selling album, earning a Grammy nomination and finally giving her the wider audience that decades of club work and smaller labels hadn’t. It remains many listeners’ introduction to a singer whose real career had started more than thirty years earlier.
28. Cassandra Wilson – Blue Light ‘Til Dawn (1993)
Wilson’s first record for Blue Note dropped the electric instrumentation of her earlier, more avant-garde work in favour of an acoustic, blues- and folk-inflected sound built by producer Craig Street around guitarist Brandon Ross, cornetist Olu Dara, clarinetist Don Byron and, on a cover of Robert Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen,” guitarist Chris Whitley.
Wilson’s father, bassist Herman Fowlkes, died during the making of the record, and something of that weight sits under even the lighter tracks. It sold well over 250,000 copies within a few years, an unusual commercial result for a record this unhurried, and reset expectations for what a jazz vocal album in the 1990s could sound like.
29. Kurt Elling – Close Your Eyes (1995)
Elling’s Blue Note debut, recorded across most of 1994 with his longtime Chicago collaborator Laurence Hobgood on piano, bassist Eric Hochberg and drummer Paul Wertico, introduced a male jazz singer working in a lineage that ran through Mark Murphy and Eddie Jefferson: dense original lyrics set to instrumental melodies, spoken-word interludes, and a wide vocal range used for effect rather than just prettiness.
AllMusic’s review at the time noted he was “pushing the envelope” for a young singer, and the Grammy nomination it earned announced an artist who would go on to win the male jazz vocalist category in DownBeat’s critics and readers polls more times than almost anyone else of his generation.
30. Dianne Reeves – The Grand Encounter (1996)
Reeves had already built a reputation across pop, R&B and jazz sessions through the 1980s before this Blue Note record, one of a run of albums in the 1990s that established her as one of the era’s most technically accomplished jazz singers, with a range and control that let her move between scat improvisation and straight balladry inside a single song.
It’s less discussed today than her later Grammy-winning work, including her Sarah Vaughan tribute The Calling, but it captures a voice at full strength working through a well-chosen set of standards and lesser-known material alike.
31. Dee Dee Bridgewater – Dear Ella (1997)
Bridgewater built this tribute the year after Ella Fitzgerald’s death, working with a band that included vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Kenny Burrell, plus arrangements from her former husband, trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, and trombonist Slide Hampton, who won his own Grammy for arranging “Cotton Tail.”
Bridgewater had met Fitzgerald several times over the years, and the record avoids straight imitation in favour of finding her own way into songs closely associated with Ella, including plenty of scat singing that nods to the source without copying it. It won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album in 1998.
32. Patricia Barber – Modern Cool (1998)
Barber, a pianist and composer as much as a singer, built her reputation on a long residency at Chicago’s Green Mill rather than on interpreting the standard repertoire, and this record, mostly original songs with lyrics as dense and literary as anything in jazz singing, made the case for her as a genuine auteur
Her regular band of guitarist John McLean, bassist Michael Arnopol and drummer Mark Walker is joined by trumpeter Dave Douglas on several tracks and an unusual addition, a vocal choir, on others. It’s a cooler, more cerebral kind of jazz vocal record than most of what came before it on this list, and it opened space for singer-songwriters working inside jazz rather than just performing its songbook.
33. Diana Krall – When I Look in Your Eyes (1999)
Coming after a run of acclaimed mid-1990s albums, this one, arranged and conducted by Johnny Mandel and produced by Tommy LiPuma, alternated her working trio of guitarist Russell Malone, bassist John Clayton and drummer Jeff Hamilton with lush orchestral tracks, a combination that had eluded a lot of previous crossover attempts.
It won two Grammys, including Best Jazz Vocal Album, and was nominated for Album of the Year, the first time a jazz record had been up for that award in 25 years. The commercial success that followed made Krall, alongside Norah Jones a few years later, one of the artists most responsible for jazz vocal records reaching pop-sized audiences at the turn of the millennium.
34. Jane Monheit – Never Never Land (2000)
Monheit was 22 when this debut came out, and the comparisons to Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan started almost immediately, based on a voice with genuine operatic control and a fondness for the same songbook repertoire those singers had made famous decades earlier.
It’s a more traditional record than most of what was happening in vocal jazz at the turn of the millennium, built on trust in the American songbook rather than any attempt to modernise it, and it made Monheit one of the more prominent younger singers working that lane through the 2000s.
35. Norah Jones – Come Away with Me (2002)
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