Sass Jordan, the Juno Award-winning rock singer and long-time “Canadian Idol” judge, has died at the age of 65.
Her family announced that she died peacefully on October 2, surrounded by loved ones. No cause of death has been made public.
In their statement, her family described her as a force of nature and a source of light and joy, whose warmth and energy reached everyone she worked and spent time with. Over a career of four decades, she became one of the best-known voices in Canadian rock, made room for women in a genre dominated by men, and gave opportunities to young musicians who played in her band.
Born Sarah Jordan in Birmingham, England, she moved to Montreal with her family at the age of three, when her father, a French literature professor, took a job at Concordia University. Her mother was a former ballerina. She grew up in a house filled with classical music, and has said that hearing The Band‘s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” on the radio, followed by seeing David Bowie on his “Diamond Dogs” tour at her first concert, set her on the path to a music career.
By 16 she was fronting bands in Montreal clubs, and she later sang and played bass in local group The Pinups. Around 1981, she briefly put up a young British manager named Simon Fuller in her basement after one of his touring acts ran out of money. More than two decades later, Fuller‘s Idol format brought them together again on “Canadian Idol“.
Her influences ranged from Rod Stewart, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne and Anthrax to Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan and Bonnie Raitt, and she closely studied male rock singers such as Steven Tyler, Paul Rodgers and Lou Gramm. She often said that rhythm is what makes a great singer.
After working as a session singer in Montreal in the mid-1980s, including on The Box‘s breakthrough hit, she signed with Atlantic Records and released her debut album, Tell Somebody, in 1988. The title track reached No. 11 in Canada, and she won the Juno Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist in 1989.
Jordan‘s best-selling album, Racine, was released through MCA in 1992 and sold around 450,000 copies worldwide. That year she also recorded “Trust In Me” with Joe Cocker for the soundtrack to “The Bodyguard“. A young Taylor Hawkins, later the drummer of Foo Fighters, was part of her touring band in the early 1990s. Her 1994 album Rats gave her a first entry on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Sun’s Gonna Rise“.
From 2003, she served as a judge on all six seasons of “Canadian Idol“. In later years, she returned to her blues roots with Rebel Moon Blues in 2020, which reached No. 5 on Billboard‘s Blues Albums chart, followed by Bitches Blues in 2022.
