Jack Jones, 86, Oct. 23 of leukemia at Eisenhower Medical Center. I called Jack “a national treasure and an institution in the Coachella Valley,” in my news obit in October for The Post. He was a two-time Grammy Award-winner in the early 1960s who was touted as the next big jazz-pop singer after Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. He never ascended to that — partly, he used to joke, because Bennett kept going into his mid-90s. But great singers always respected his talent and, when he embraced jazz in the late 1980s, critics began touting his greatness, too. Jack, at least outwardly, didn’t seem to care about his lack of mass recognition. He was proud to be called “a singer’s singer,” and he celebrated that in the title song of his 1987 LP, “I Am A Singer,” re-inventing the original recording by soft rock duo Seals and Crofts.
When he moved to the desert a few years after that release, he seemed more concerned about being a good dad to his daughter, Nicole, than being Sinatra’s heir. He embraced the desert community, where he had spent much of his childhood with his movie star parents. He became involved in dozens of charities and served as a spokesman for the McCallum Theatre, where he announced, “I live here now!” He attended the celebration of my 30th anniversary at The Desert Sun and my Desert Sun retirement party 10 years later. We in the Coachella Valley were so lucky that one of the world’s great singers just wanted to just hang with us.
