Janet Thurlow

Thurlow was born on May 21, 1926, in Seattle – the first of five children. She took violin, piano, and singing lessons as a teenager.^[1] As a child, she sang on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour hosted by Major Edward Bowes.^[2] She attended Broadway High School in Seattle, but had to drop out after ninth grade to care for her siblings after her parents' divorce. A few years later, Thurlow moved into her own apartment after her mother's death, befriended a young Ray Charles, and began cultivating an appreciation of jazz as well as jazz singing.^[2]

In 1949, she began as a "song stylist" with Robert "Bumps" Blackwell's Seattle-based band,^[3] which at that time had a 16-year old Quincy Jones as arranger and trumpet player and Ray Charles, then known as "R.C.", playing piano and alto sax.^[4]

In 1950, Lionel Hampton hired her to play with his band.^[1] Thurlow convinced Hampton to hire her friend Quincy Jones as a trumpeter.^[5] In the April 1951, Thurlow recorded the song "I Can't Believe You're in Love with Me" with Hampton's orchestra for Decca Records.^[6] Mike Barnes wrote that this recording made "her perhaps the first white singer to front an all-Black big band."^[1] In August 1951, Thurlow performed with Hampton's orchestra at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood.^[7] At the end of that month, they performed at the Trianon Ballroom in Seattle that featured Jones and Thurlow as "Two Seattleites".^[1][3]

That same year, Thurlow met trombonist Jimmy Cleveland, a fellow band member with Hampton's orchestra.^[8] They married on April 2, 1953 in Chicago.^[9]

In November 1952, Thurlow converted to the Jehovah's Witnesses.^[10]

By April 1953, Thurlow had left Hampton's orchestra and was performing solo in Chicago.^[11]

On October 28, 1953, she was the vocalist on "Eclipse," a song about interracial romance written by Charles Mingus, and recorded with his octet.^[12]

Thurlow during this time began to volunteer as a violinist at Jehovah's Witnesses' regional conventions at New York's Yankee Stadium, Philadelphia's Connie Mack Stadium, and Los Angeles' Dodger Stadium.^[10]

Thurlow and her husband moved in 1967 from New York to Lynwood, California.^[1] Thurlow began teaching vocal music^[2] but did not begin to perform jazz again until 1983,^[2] when she began occasional performing and recording with Cleveland^[8] until her husband's death in 2008.^[1][2]

Thurlow died of heart failure, aged 96, at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood in 2022.^[1] She was buried beside her husband at Riverside National Cemetery.^[13]

• "Thurlow, Janet". The Northwest Music Archives. Retrieved November 16, 2022.
• Eclipse on YouTube, sung with the Charles Mingus Octet
• Blue Tide on YouTube, sung with the Charles Mingus Octet