Artist: Ernestine Anderson

Ernestine Anderson (November 11, 1928 – March 10, 2016) was an American jazz and  blues singer. 

In a career spanning more than six decades, she recorded over 30 albums. She was nominated four times for a Grammy Award. She sang at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Monterey Jazz Festival (six times over a 33-year span), as well as at jazz festivals all over the world. In the early 1990s she joined Qwest Records, the label founded by fellow Garfield High School graduate Quincy Jones. 

Her first album in the United States was made after her debut album, recorded in  Sweden and released here by Mercury Records under the title Hot Cargo  (1958). In 1959 Anderson won the DownBeat  "New Star" Award and recorded for Mercury to more acclaim, before dividing her time from the mid-1960s between America and Europe. 

"I don't think jazz ever died. It suffered a setback during the sixties. I had to move to London in order to work because a jazz person couldn't work in the United States when rock 'n' roll became the music. I didn't think it would last this long, and I don't think the rock 'n' roll people thought it would last this long, but Quincy it had."

Her re-emergence in the mid-1970s (at which time Ray Brown was her manager) came as a result of a sensational appearance at the 1976 Concord Jazz Festival. A string of albums for Concord Records followed. The next 17 years sealed Anderson's reputation as a top-tier jazz and blues singer. She performed headlining shows far and wide and recorded almost 20 albums for Concord, two of which—1981's Never Make Your Move Too Soon and 1983's Big City—earned Grammy Award Best Jazz Vocal Performance nominations.

In the years that followed Anderson toured widely—a triumphant series of dates in Japan led to the release of a four-disc live set in 1988—and that same year she made her debut at Carnegie Hall. In addition, Anderson has performed at the Hollywood Bowl, at the Women In Jazz event at the Kennedy Center in 1999, at Monterey (1959, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1990, 2007), and at numerous other jazz festivals from New Orleans to Brazil, Berlin, Austria, and all around the globe. 

After leaving Concord Records in 1993, Anderson signed on with her old Seattle jazz scene pal, Quincy Jones, and his happening new label, Qwest, which issued two albums—1993's Now and Then, and 1996's Blues, Dues & Love News—that also both received Grammy nominations. By the late 1990s, she was signed to the Koch International label, which issued her Isn't It Romantic album, in 2003 her High Note label CD, Love Makes the Changes was a breakout hit, and her 2004 JVC CD, Hello Like Before, brought further accolades.