Carol Sloane, jazz singer of late-blooming acclaim, 85

Carol Sloane, a jazz singer who won early acclaim for her sultry interpretations of classic songs, then emerged decades afterward from near-obscurity with a late-career resurgence that brought her fresh recognition as one of the world’s finest song stylists, died Jan. 23 at a senior care center in Stoneham, Mass. She was 85.

The cause was complications from a stroke two years ago, said her stepdaughter, Sandra de Novellis.

Ms. Sloane was among the last singers who came up in the big-band tradition of jazz and swing music and was seen as an heir to the jazz vocal tradition of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and her idol, Carmen McRae.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, she headlined at nightclubs; shared the stage with jazz musicians such as Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Clark Terry; had a major-label recording contract; and sometimes substituted for Annie Ross in the hip vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.

During a 1961 appearance at a jazz festival in Newport, R.I., Ms. Sloane discovered that her pianist did not know the introductory verse to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “Little Girl Blue.” As she sang the verse a cappella, a hush fell over the crowd, and critics were mesmerized by her confidence and vocal control. She was heralded as a rising star in jazz.

“She is one of the very few singers who can make conversation stop in a club,” jazz critic Nat Hentoff once wrote. “She has presence ... She gets inside you — the knowing voice, the sensuous textures, and the lyrics that become a conversation.”

She released two albums on Columbia, sang several times on the “Tonight Show,” became a regular on Arthur Godfrey’s national radio program and was featured at nightclubs from the Village Vanguard in New York to the Hungry I in San Francisco. She appeared on the same bill as comedians Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce and the Smothers Brothers, and, for a time, her opening act was Richard Pryor.

Ms. Sloane once introduced herself to Duke Ellington, saying she made it a point to sing at least one of his tunes in every performance. She went on to make three albums of Ellington’s music and recorded his song “I Didn’t Know About You” no fewer than four times. She befriended the sometimes acerbic McRae, who was a disciple of Billie Holiday and became Ms. Sloane’s mentor in interpreting a song.

“Singers have the responsibility to make you feel moved in some way when you hear us sing,” Ms. Sloane told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. “You should feel pain, if there’s pain in the song, or happiness or joy or whatever there is. And the singer should let you hear that they know something of this experience we’re singing about and convey it with sincerity.”

She sometimes lamented that she was born a generation too late. Closer in age to John Lennon and Janis Joplin than to Fitzgerald or Holiday, Ms. Sloane saw her once-promising career collapse in the mid1960s with the rise of rockand-roll.