Mary Ann McCall; Sang With Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman

Mary Ann McCall, 75, former big-band singer who became one of the most critically acclaimed jazz singers of the 1940s. A native of Philadelphia, she began as a singer and dancer with Buddy Morrow’s band. She worked with Tommy Dorsey in 1938, with Woody Herman in 1939 and again from 1946 to 1950, and with Charlie Barnet in 1940. By the 1960s she was performing at Chubby Jackson’s Estate Club in Hollywood. The late jazz expert Leonard Feather wrote of Miss McCall in his “Encyclopedia of Jazz”: “Once a conventional pop singer, she evolved during the 1940s into a very convincing stylist much admired by jazzmen.” The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz described her as “one of the finest jazz singers” with a style like that of Billie Holiday. On Dec. 14 in Los Angeles.