Jazz vocalist Eddie Jefferson had a wonderfully warm style that always brings a smile to my face.

A onetime tap dancer, he traveled the country in the 1940s with a turntable, listening to jazz solos in his hotel room. Listening night after night, he invented a new form of jazz singing, “vocalese,” in which he created lyrics for these long, freewheeling solos. His “songs” were actually his vocal renditions of solos by jazz musicians like Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young.

His singing is profound and completely unmannered. While some singers cloak themselves in technique, using vocal tricks to be “entertainers,” Jefferson sang in a natural and open style that seemed to lay his heart bare, without a trace of artifice but with a transcendently human quality.

Here he is on his classic “There I Go Again.”