Shirley Jones
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Shirley Jones grew up in Ridgway, Illinois and attended the University of Illinois on a full scholarship in Music, majoring in singing. At 14, she began singing jazz professionally on weekends throughout southern Illinois with the Jack Jones Band in which her father played the alto saxophone. Writing autobiographically she says:
Some of my happiest memories are of jam sessions on weekends at our home. As I heard There’ll Be Some Changes Made, Hold That Tiger, and Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home, I had a feeling of the world as good. Eli Siegel explains why: “Music, with its oneness of wail and gaiety, of slowness and speed, of lugubriousness and crotchet, of bass and treble, of continuous and discontinuous, of abstraction and tangibility, of sweetness and harshness—presents a picture of the world which, through making symmetry and unsymmetry one, gives a person a chance of liking it” (TRO 102). It was hearing opposites as one in music, I was to learn from Aesthetic Realism, that made me think reality had good sense. (TRO 743)
During the 1950s and 60s Ms. Jones worked as a jazz singer in St Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Miami Beach, Santa Monica and San Francisco. She went on the road with the Walt Loftiss Big Band in the 50s, and in the years that followed sang with Red Norvo, Stan Kenton, the pianist, Arnold Ross and the guitarist, Joe Pass.
Ms. Jones has also had a life-long care for film and worked as a film editor.
She began to study Aesthetic Realism in 1973 at the age of 41, and in 1974 began attending classes with Eli Siegel to teach this education. She became a consultant in 1976 and has spoken in public seminars in which she has discussed the lives and music of Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Edith Piaf and others. Her articles on jazz have been published in various newspapers.
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Shirley Jones
