The Greatest Jazz Singers of All Time: 20 Voices from Ella to Esperanza

Jazz singers are vocalists who interpret the jazz repertoire using techniques such as scat, blue notes, melodic improvisation, and advanced rhythmic phrasing, a tradition stretching from Louis Armstrong’s 1920s recordings to Cécile McLorin Salvant’s 21st-century work. These are the 20 greatest jazz singers of all time, spanning roughly a century of vocal jazz history, each profiled with an essential album and a signature track.

Jazz criticism has long favored instrumentalists, treating vocalists as a secondary concern. That bias has always been wrong, and this list exists to correct it. The famous jazz singers here, men and women, classic and contemporary, American and international, represent the full range of what jazz singing has been and continues to become. Whether you’re new to the genre or a committed listener, these are the jazz singers of all time you need to know.

What Separates a Great Jazz Singer from a Great Singer?

The term jazz vocalist describes something more specific than a singer who performs jazz songs. It describes a musician who uses the voice the way a horn player uses an instrument: as a vehicle for improvisation, rhythmic invention, and harmonic dialogue with the band.

Four technical demands define the category. First, phrasing and time: the ability to sit behind or ahead of the beat, bending the melody’s relationship to the rhythm section. Billie Holiday is the canonical example, she rarely landed a phrase where you expected it, and that displacement was the emotional content. Second, melodic improvisation: not repeating the written melody but reharmonizing it, finding new paths through the chord changes. Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan represent contrasting models, Ella through swing and rhythmic variation, Vaughan through harmonic substitution that rivaled bebop pianists.

Third, scat and instrumental thinking: treating the voice as a horn, generating improvised lines without words. Louis Armstrong invented the modern template; Betty Carter pushed it to its logical extreme. Fourth, lyric interpretation and emotional authority: the storytelling dimension that separates jazz from pop. Johnny Hartman and Nina Simone, in very different ways, demonstrated that a lyric is not decoration, it’s the argument. As music critic Will Friedwald documented in Jazz Singing, the greatest vocalists don’t perform songs; they inhabit them.

How We Selected These 20 Voices

Our editorial team evaluated singers on five criteria: recorded legacy, influence on subsequent vocalists, technical mastery, stylistic distinctiveness, and cultural impact on jazz as a genre. We weighted historical influence heavily, because jazz singing is a lineage, each generation learns directly from the last.

The list is deliberately cross-era, cross-gender, and cross-style, addressing a real gap in most published rankings, which tend to skew heavily female or heavily classic-era. This is an overview, not an encyclopedia. For deeper dives, see our full feature on female jazz singers, the greatest male jazz singers, and the Black vocalists who built jazz.

The Founding Voices, Jazz Singing Takes Shape (1920s-1940s)

Before the LP, before the microphone was standard equipment, vocalists were entertainers, bandleaders, and sonic innovators simultaneously. They had to project over brass sections and communicate to ballroom crowds without amplification. The singers who emerged from this era, explored in depth in our coverage of the jazz singers of the 1920s, built the vocabulary every subsequent vocalist has drawn from.

1. Louis Armstrong

Era: 1920s-1960s | Style: Scat, gravelly swing, blues expressionism

Born in New Orleans in 1901, Armstrong was the first jazz instrumentalist to prove that a “flawed” voice could be more communicative than a technically polished one. His vocal style is a direct extension of his trumpet work, the same rhythmic displacement, the same blues inflection, the same instinct for the unexpected phrase. His 1929 recording of “Ain’t Misbehavin'” established the template for jazz vocal personality: warmth, wit, and absolute rhythmic authority. Every singer on this list owes him something.

Essential Album: Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy (Columbia, 1954)
Signature Track: “West End Blues” (1928) / “What a Wonderful World” (1967)

2. Billie Holiday

Era: 1930s-1950s | Style: Behind-the-beat phrasing, emotional intensity, narrative intimacy

Born in Philadelphia in 1915, Holiday is the definitive argument that jazz singing is about truth, not technique. She transformed Tin Pan Alley standards into deeply personal confessions, arriving late on every phrase in a way that felt less like a stylistic choice and more like emotional necessity. “Strange Fruit” (1939) remains one of the most important vocal recordings in American music history. Her partnership with tenor saxophonist Lester Young produced some of jazz’s most perfectly balanced ensemble moments, two voices, one instrumental, one human, in complete accord. See our full feature on female jazz singers for a deeper look at her legacy.

Essential Album: Lady in Satin (Columbia, 1958)
Signature Track: “Strange Fruit” (1939)

3. Ella Fitzgerald

Era: 1930s-1990s | Style: Scat virtuosity, harmonic precision, wide vocal range

Born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1917, Fitzgerald is the most technically accomplished vocalist in jazz history, a claim that is genuinely hard to dispute. Her eight Verve Songbook albums, recorded between 1956 and 1964, set the standard for interpreting the Great American Songbook. Her scat technique, demonstrated definitively on “How High the Moon” from her 1960 Berlin concert, remains the benchmark for improvised jazz singing. She received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1967 and accumulated multiple Grammy wins across her career, making her one of the most decorated vocalists in the award’s history.

Essential Album: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook (Verve, 1956)
Signature Track: “How High the Moon” (live, Berlin, 1960)

4. Nat King Cole

Era: 1940s-1960s | Style: Warm baritone, understated swing, pianist’s sense of melody

Born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1919, Cole began as a jazz pianist of rare distinction before his warm baritone drew him toward vocal stardom. His vocal style carries a pianist’s understanding of harmony and space, he phrases like a right hand working through chord changes, leaving room for the rhythm to breathe. “Straighten Up and Fly Right” (1943) established him commercially; his trio recordings for Capitol remain among the most swinging small-group vocal sessions ever committed to tape.

Essential Album: The Nat King Cole Trio Recordings (Capitol, 1942-1948 sessions)
Signature Track: “Route 66” (1946)

The Golden Age, Jazz Vocals at Their Peak (1950s-1960s)

The postwar era produced jazz’s deepest concentration of vocal talent. The LP format gave singers room to build a mood across a full side of vinyl, major-label investment brought orchestral resources, and bebop’s harmonic language pushed vocalists to new levels of sophistication. Eight singers define this peak.

5. Sarah Vaughan

Era: 1940s-1990s | Style: Wide operatic range, radical reharmonization, absolute pitch control

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1924, “Sassy” possessed arguably the most purely beautiful and technically astonishing voice in jazz history. Where Holiday bent melody through feeling and Fitzgerald through swing, Vaughan reimagined melody through harmony, she heard chord substitutions the way bebop pianists did, and her voice could execute them with the precision of a horn. Her EmArcy sessions with Clifford Brown in 1954 document her at her most adventurous. DownBeat readers voted her Best Female Vocalist multiple times across her career. For more on her influence, visit our full feature on female jazz singers.

Essential Album: Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown (EmArcy, 1954)
Signature Track: “Lullaby of Birdland” (1954)

6. Frank Sinatra

Era: 1940s-1980s | Style: Legato phrasing, lyric storytelling, microphone mastery

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1915, Sinatra’s specific contribution to jazz singing is this: no vocalist before him understood the microphone as a compositional tool the way he did, using it to sustain conversational intimacy across large orchestral arrangements. His Capitol recordings with arranger Nelson Riddle, made between 1953 and 1961, are the foundational texts of orchestral jazz singing. His phrasing, long breath, late resolve, a slight lean into the consonants, remains a masterclass in controlled tension. Read more about his peers in the greatest male jazz singers.

Essential Album: In the Wee Small Hours (Capitol, 1955)
Signature Track: “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)”

7. Chet Baker

Era: 1950s-1980s | Style: Whispered vulnerability, cool West Coast intimacy

Born in Yale, Oklahoma, in 1929, Baker’s vocal work is inseparable from his trumpet playing, both operate in a register of wounded tenderness that was unlike anything else in 1950s jazz. His Pacific Jazz recordings from 1954 effectively created the template for vulnerable male jazz singing: quiet, unguarded, almost uncomfortably close. His version of “My Funny Valentine” has been covered hundreds of times since. The voice and the life were one artifact: beautiful, fragile, and ultimately self-destructive. His story is explored further in the greatest male jazz singers.

Essential Album: Chet Baker Sings (Pacific Jazz, 1954)
Signature Track: “My Funny Valentine”

8. Mel Tormé

Era: 1940s-1990s | Style: Velvet Fog tone, scat precision, arranger’s intelligence

Born in Chicago in 1925, Tormé was nicknamed “The Velvet Fog” for a tone that blurred the boundary between speaking and singing. He was also a gifted composer, he co-wrote “The Christmas Song” at age 19 in 1945, as well as an arranger and multi-instrumentalist. His jazz credentials are often underrated because of his pop success, but his later Concord Jazz recordings demonstrate a rhythmic sophistication and scat fluency that few contemporaries matched.

Essential Album: Mel Tormé with the Marty Paich Dek-tette (Bethlehem, 1956)
Signature Track: “Lulu’s Back in Town”

9. Johnny Hartman

Era: 1950s-1970s | Style: Deep baritone, ballad warmth, unhurried authority

Born in Houma, Louisiana in 1923, Hartman recorded prolifically but achieved immortality in a single 1963 session with John Coltrane that produced one of the most celebrated vocal jazz albums ever made. His voice, a deep, polished baritone of almost architectural composure, was the perfect counterweight to Coltrane’s harmonic intensity. His recording of “Lush Life” from that session is widely considered the definitive version of Billy Strayhorn’s most personal composition. The album is a one-of-a-kind document: two artists at peak powers, pulling in opposite directions and somehow arriving at the same place.

Essential Album: John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman (Impulse!, 1963)
Signature Track: “Lush Life” (1963)

10. Carmen McRae

Era: 1950s-1990s | Style: Piano-informed phrasing, ironic lyric intelligence, behind-the-beat control

Born in New York in 1920, McRae is the most under-credited figure on this list. A trained pianist, she brought a chord-player’s understanding of melody to her singing, she described herself as “a piano player who sings.” Her phrasing is uncommonly sophisticated: late, dry, sometimes sardonic, always revealing something new inside a lyric. Her Billie Holiday tribute album is one of jazz’s great acts of respectful reinvention, honoring a predecessor without imitating her. Explore her legacy further in our full feature on female jazz singers.

Essential Album: Carmen McRae Sings Lover Man and Other Billie Holiday Classics (Columbia, 1962)
Signature Track: “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To”

11. Nina Simone

Era: 1950s-2000s | Style: Classical piano technique, blues intensity, radical political directness

Born in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, Simone is the hardest vocalist on this list to categorize, and that difficulty is the point. Classically trained and rejected from the Curtis Institute (a wound she never stopped discussing publicly), she built a vocal and piano style that drew equally from gospel, blues, Bach, and folk. Her recordings for Philips and RCA in the 1960s, particularly “Four Women” and “Mississippi Goddam”, function as jazz as social document. Her work is central to the Black vocalists who built jazz.

Essential Album: Wild Is the Wind (Philips, 1966)
Signature Track: “Four Women” / “Feeling Good”

12. Tony Bennett

Era: 1950s-2010s | Style: Lyric baritone, impeccable taste, longevity as artistic discipline

Born in New York in 1926 and passing in 2023, Bennett’s career arc, from Columbia pop star to genuine jazz artist, is one of music’s great second acts. His mid-1970s decision to leave Columbia and record for smaller labels on his own terms produced some of his most critically respected work. His two collaborative albums with pianist Bill Evans, recorded in 1975 and 1976, are among the most intimate jazz vocal recordings ever made. His voice, remarkably, only deepened in quality through his eighties.

Essential Album: The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album (Fantasy, 1975)
Signature Track: “But Beautiful” (with Bill Evans)

The Bridge Voices, Keeping Jazz Singing Alive (1970s-1990s)

As rock dominated the cultural conversation through the 1970s and 1980s, these three singers maintained jazz vocal standards while pushing the form into new harmonic and rhythmic territory. Let’s be honest: without them, the contemporary renaissance might not have had a foundation to build on.

13. Betty Carter

Era: 1950s-1990s | Style: Radical tempo manipulation, extreme melodic improvisation, bebop daring

Born in Flint, Michigan, in 1929 and passing in 1998, Carter was the bebop singer, the one whose vocal improvisation most directly mirrored what Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were doing on their horns. She famously slowed ballads to near-stasis and swung uptempo songs into abstraction. She ran her own label, Bet-Car Productions, for years rather than compromise her artistic vision. A generation of jazz musicians, including pianists Cyrus Chestnut and Mulgrew Miller, came up through her working band.

Essential Album: The Audience with Betty Carter (Bet-Car, 1980)
Signature Track: “The Trolley Song” (her extreme slow version is the essential document)

14. Cassandra Wilson

Era: 1980s-present | Style: Deep alto, blues-folk-jazz synthesis, American roots reimagination

Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1955, Wilson expanded the jazz vocalist’s repertoire in a way nobody had since Nina Simone, recording Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, and U2 songs alongside jazz standards, and making all of it feel continuous. Her Blue Note albums of the 1990s, particularly Blue Light ‘Til Dawn (1993) and New Moon Daughter, are the most critically acclaimed jazz vocal records of that decade. Critics named her among the most important voices of her generation, and her influence on younger singers who followed is direct and traceable. More on her work in our full feature on female jazz singers.

Essential Album: Blue Light ‘Til Dawn (Blue Note, 1993)
Signature Track: “You Don’t Know What Love Is”

15. Dianne Reeves

Era: 1980s-present | Style: Gospel-rooted alto, wide range, warm swing authority

Born in Detroit in 1956 and raised in Denver, Reeves is the most decorated contemporary jazz vocalist of her generation, earning multiple consecutive Grammy wins for Best Jazz Vocal Album in the early 2000s. Her voice bridges Betty Carter’s harmonic adventurousness and Ella Fitzgerald’s technical command, grounded in a gospel directness that gives every performance emotional weight. Her work on the Good Night, and Good Luck soundtrack (2005) introduced her to a film audience. She remains one of the most formidable live jazz vocalists working today. See our full feature on female jazz singers for the full profile.

Essential Album: The Grand Encounter (Blue Note, 1996)
Signature Track: “Better Days”

The Contemporary Voices, Jazz Singing Now (2000s-Present)

These five singers are actively redefining what jazz vocal music sounds like and means. According to JazzTimes’ 2024 year-end vocal review, contemporary jazz vocalists face a perpetual challenge in determining their repertoire, and the most successful singers have each found their own distinct approach to that question. The contemporary jazz singers defining the genre today covered here represent the genre’s most compelling current arguments.

16. Kurt Elling

Era: 1990s-present | Style: Extended baritone range, vocalese mastery, literary lyric writing

Born in Chicago in 1967, Elling is the most prolific and decorated male jazz vocalist of his generation, earning multiple Grammy nominations and a win for Dedicated to You in 2010. His approach is scholarly without being academic, he writes new lyrics to instrumental jazz solos (a practice called vocalese, tracing to Eddie Jefferson and Jon Hendricks), but with a density of literary reference unlike any predecessor. His live performances expand arrangements into something closer to theatrical events than concerts. More in the greatest male jazz singers.

Essential Album: The Messenger (Blue Note, 1997)
Signature Track: “Nature Boy”

17. Gregory Porter

Era: 2010s-present | Style: Rich bass-baritone, gospel warmth, classic repertoire with contemporary production

Born in Sacramento in 1971, Porter arrived late and fully formed, his 2010 debut Water introduced a voice of unusual depth and a songwriting sensibility rooted in gospel, soul, and classic jazz simultaneously. Multiple Grammy wins in the Best Jazz Vocal Album category confirmed what his audiences already knew. He is one of the rare contemporary jazz singers who has crossed over to mainstream pop audiences without diluting his jazz identity. His story continues in the greatest male jazz singers.

Essential Album: Liquid Spirit (Blue Note, 2013)
Signature Track: “Liquid Spirit” / “1960 What?”

18. Cécile McLorin Salvant

Era: 2010s-present | Style: Theatrical dramatic range, historic repertoire excavation, harmonic sophistication

Born in Miami in 1989, who later moved to France for her studies, Salvant is the most critically acclaimed jazz vocalist of the 21st century. She has earned multiple Grammy wins for Best Jazz Vocal Album, with wins in 2016, 2018, and 2019, and has topped the DownBeat Critics Poll multiple years running. She excavates forgotten corners of the American Songbook, 1920s blues, pre-war pop, vaudeville, and performs them with a dramatic intelligence closer to Brecht than Basie. Her range, both technical and emotional, is without current peer in jazz. See our full feature on female jazz singers for the full treatment.

Essential Album: WomanChild (Mack Avenue, 2013)
Signature Track: “You’ve Got to Give Me Some”

19. Samara Joy

Era: 2020s-present | Style: Rich alto, lyric swing, classic jazz sensibility in a millennial voice

Born in New York on November 11, 1999, Joy’s emergence was one of jazz’s great recent stories. She won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition in 2019, then took home Grammy awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album and Best New Artist in 2023, becoming one of the youngest Best New Artist winners in the award’s recent history. Her album Linger Awhile demonstrates a stylistic maturity and tonal richness that most vocalists take decades to develop. She is the genre’s most compelling argument for its own future. Explore her work in our full feature on female jazz singers and contemporary jazz singers defining the genre today.

Essential Album: Linger Awhile (Verve, 2022)
Signature Track: “Linger Awhile”

20. Esperanza Spalding

Era: 2000s-present | Style: Bass virtuosity merged with song, chamber jazz composition, genre-defying

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1984, Spalding is the only bassist on this list, which understates how fundamentally different her relationship to jazz singing is. She composes and arranges her own material, plays double bass simultaneously while singing, and has increasingly moved toward extended compositional forms, including Emily’s D+Evolution and 12 Little Spells, that treat the voice as one element in a larger orchestral argument. Grammy wins in 2011 for Best New Artist and subsequent wins in jazz categories mark a career in permanent artistic motion. Her work is central to contemporary jazz singers defining the genre today.

Essential Album: Chamber Music Society (Heads Up, 2010)
Signature Track: “Black Gold”

Quick Reference, The 20 Greatest Jazz Singers at a Glance

The table below covers all 20 singers in one scannable block, era, essential album, and the one track to start with if you’re new to each voice.

The Voice Across Generations, What These 20 Singers Share

Here’s the thing: despite spanning a century and wildly different styles, these top jazz singers share three qualities that no amount of era or genre difference erases. First, every one of them treats the voice as a jazz instrument capable of improvisation, not just melody delivery. Even Sinatra, the most “pop” figure on this list, improvised his phrasing in real time against the orchestra.

Second, all 20 are identifiable in three seconds. You know Holiday’s voice from the first syllable. You know Armstrong’s from the first breath. That irreducible sonic identity, what musicians call “sound”, is the hardest thing to teach and the first thing a great jazz singer develops.

Third, all of them expanded the repertoire rather than just interpreting it. The lineage is direct and traceable: Ella Fitzgerald learned from Connee Boswell, Betty Carter absorbed Billie Holiday, Cécile McLorin Salvant studied all of the above and then went further back, into pre-war blues and vaudeville that most singers had forgotten. That’s how a tradition stays alive, not by repeating itself, but by each generation finding what the previous one missed. Explore the full story through the Black vocalists who built jazz and contemporary jazz singers defining the genre today.

Frequently Asked Questions About Jazz Singers

Who is considered the greatest jazz singer of all time?

There’s no single answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Ella Fitzgerald is the most commonly cited consensus choice, based on her technical range, her recorded legacy across the Verve Songbook series, and her consistent placement at the top of critics’ polls across DownBeat, JazzTimes, and AllAboutJazz. But Billie Holiday is an equally valid answer if your criterion is emotional impact, and Sarah Vaughan if it’s pure technical virtuosity. The debate is the point, jazz singing is rich enough to support all three arguments simultaneously.

Who are the best female jazz singers of all time?

The short list starts with Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan, the three figures who defined what jazz singing could be. Nina Simone, Carmen McRae, and Betty Carter each pushed the form in directions those three didn’t reach. Among contemporary voices, Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves, Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Samara Joy represent the tradition’s continuing vitality. For the full ranking and deeper profiles, see our full feature on female jazz singers.

Who are the most popular jazz singers today?

Cécile McLorin Salvant and Samara Joy lead the critical conversation, with Salvant’s Grammy wins and Joy’s 2023 Best New Artist award marking them as the two most visible jazz vocalists of the current moment. Gregory Porter commands the largest mainstream audience of any active jazz singer, crossing into pop and soul territory without abandoning his jazz roots. Esperanza Spalding and Kurt Elling remain the most adventurous voices in the contemporary field. For a full survey, visit contemporary jazz singers defining the genre today.

What makes a jazz singer different from a pop singer?

The core difference is improvisation and rhythmic freedom. A pop singer typically delivers a melody as written, with emotional expression as the primary variable. A jazz singer treats the written melody as a starting point, altering rhythms, reharmonizing phrases, and improvising new melodic lines in real time. Jazz singers also work in direct dialogue with their rhythm section, responding to what the pianist or bassist plays rather than performing over a fixed backing track. The voice, in jazz, is an instrument in the band, not a soloist accompanied by it. Our jazz education section covers these techniques in depth.

Where can I learn more about jazz vocal history?

Start with the recordings: the essential albums listed above cover roughly a century of the form. For historical context, our features section covers jazz history from the 1920s forward. Will Friedwald’s book Jazz Singing remains the most thorough written survey of the tradition. For contemporary coverage, JazzTimes and DownBeat publish regular features on active vocalists. And the sub-articles linked throughout this piece go deeper on specific eras, genders, and styles than this overview can.

Jazz singing is not a closed archive. Samara Joy is 26. Cécile McLorin Salvant is still in the middle of what may be the most important vocal career of the century. The next great jazz singer is almost certainly already performing in a club somewhere, working out their relationship to this tradition. That’s the best reason to keep listening.