Music world mourning loss of singer Nancy Wilson

Grammy-winning jazz and pop singer Nancy Wilson has died aged 81.

Her manager Devra Hall Levy said that Wilson died peacefully at her home in Pioneertown, a California desert community near Joshua Tree National Park, after a long illness.

Influenced by Dinah Washington, Nat King Cole and other stars, Wilson covered everything from jazz standards to Little Green Apples and in the 1960s alone released eight albums that reached the top 20 on Billboard’s pop charts.

Sometimes elegant and understated, or quick and conversational, she was best known for such songs as her breakthrough Guess Who I Saw Today and the 1964 hit (You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am, which drew upon Broadway, pop and jazz.

Wilson retired from touring in 2011.

She resisted being identified with a single category, especially jazz, and referred to herself as a “song stylist”.

In 2010, she told The San Francisco Chronicle: “The music that I sing today was the pop music of the 1960s. I just never considered myself a jazz singer. I do not do runs and – you know.

“I take a lyric and make it mine. I consider myself an interpreter of the lyric.”

Wilson’s dozens of albums included a celebrated collaboration with Cannonball Adderley, Nancy Wilson/cannonball Adderley, a small group setting which understandably could be called jazz; Broadway – My Way; Lush Life; and The Nancy Wilson Show!, a best-selling concert recording.

How Glad I Am brought her a Grammy in 1965 for best R&B performance, and she later won Grammys for best jazz vocal album in 2005 for the intimate R.S.V.P (Rare Songs, Very Personal) and in 2007 for Turned to Blue, a showcase for the relaxed, confident swing she mastered later in life.

The National Endowment for the Arts awarded her a Jazz Masters Fellowship in 2004 for lifetime achievement. Wilson also had a busy career on TV, film and radio, her credits including Hawaii Five-o, Police Story, the Robert Townsend spoof Meteor Man and years hosting NPR’S Jazz Profiles series. Active in the civil rights movement, including the Selma march of 1965, she received an NAACP Image Award in 1998.

Wilson was married twice – to drummer Kenny Dennis, whom she divorced in 1970; and to Wiley Burton, who died in 2008. She had three children.

Born in Chillicothe, Ohio, the eldest of six children of an iron foundry worker and a maid, Wilson sang in church as a girl and by age four had decided on her profession.

She was in high school when she won a talent contest sponsored by a local TV station and was given her own programme.

After briefly attending Central State College, she toured Ohio with the Rusty Bryant’s Carolyn Club Big Band and met such jazz artists as Adderley, who encouraged her to move to New York.

She soon had a regular gig at The Blue Morocco, and got in touch with Adderley’s manager, John Levy.

Her first album, Like in Love!, came out in 1959, and she had her greatest commercial success over the following decade.

In the 1970s and after, she continued to record regularly and perform worldwide, at home in nightclubs, concert halls and open-air settings, singing at jazz festivals from Newport to Tokyo.

When she turned 70, in 2007, she was guest of honour at a Carnegie Hall gala..

In accordance with Wilson’s wishes, there will be no funeral service, a family statement said.

A celebration of her life will be held most likely in February, the month of her birth.

Nancy with her 2005 Grammy.