Sheila Jordan is a jazz singer's jazz singer, a master of phrasing, inhabiting the sentiment of lyrics and improvising in a way that goes way behind scatting: On “Better Than Anything” she spontaneously introduces her bandmates in song. In the early ‘50s she moved to New York, befriending bebop great Charlie Parker before his death and marrying his pianist Duke Jordan. She's never stopped embodying the music's improvisational spirit without sacrificing the art of melody; her blend of rhythmic agility and concise phrasing was evident on “Baltimore Oriole” from her 1962 debut, qualities undiminished more than five decades later on “The Meaning of the Blues.”