In a six-decade career, Jack Jones, who has died of leukaemia aged 86, became one of the most popular and admired singers of mainstream easy-listening music. His supple, expressive voice enabled him to wring the maximum expression from a lyric, and Frank Sinatra once tipped him as “the best singer in the business. He has a distinction, an all-round quality that puts him potentially about three lengths in front of the other guys.”
Jones was firmly in the tradition of performers such as Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Andy Williams and Mel Tormé. Like his contemporaries, he found his big-band sound (featuring arrangements by such leading names as Nelson Riddle and Billy May) overshadowed by the boom in rock and pop music in the 1960s and 70s.
