Not everyone was impressed. The critic Martin Williams wrote that Mr. Hendricks’s “trivial” lyrics tended to make jazz seem like “pretty light stuff.” In contrast, his fellow critic Leonard Feather christened Mr. Hendricks “the poet laureate of modern jazz” and said his writing showed “a talent bordering on genius.” 
 
 Mr. Hendricks himself shied away from describing himself as a poet, and not all his lyrics hold up well on their own, divorced from the music. But at his best he could put words to improvised solos that captured the musicality of their source material while adding a verbal vitality of their own. 
 
 For example, he turned Horace Silver’s piano solo on the medium-tempo blues “Doodlin’ ” into a meditation on the hidden meaning of doodles, with lines like these: 
 
 Those weird designs 
 
 They only show what’s going on 
 
 In weirder minds 
 
 ’Cause when you doodle, then your noodle’s flyin’ blind. 
 
 Every single thing that you write 
 
 Just conceivably might 
 
 Be a thought that you captured while coppin’ a wink. 
 
 Doodlin’ 
 
 Takes you beyond what you see, 
 
 Makes you write what you think. 
 
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 John Carl Hendricks (he dropped the “h” from his first name when he went into show business) was born on Sept. 16, 1921, in Newark, Ohio, near Columbus. His father, Alexander Hendricks, was an A.M.E. Zion minister, and his mother, the former Willie Mae Carrington, led the choir at the church where Mr. Hendricks first sang in public, at age 7. 
 
 He began singing professionally seven years later, after moving to Toledo with his parents and his 14 brothers and sisters. He sang on the radio and at a local nightclub, where for two years his accompanist was Art Tatum, then little known outside Ohio but soon to become celebrated as the foremost piano virtuoso in jazz. 
 
 Mr. Hendricks became a full-time singer in Detroit after high school and then served overseas in the Army during World War II. He later studied English literature at the University of Toledo and harbored thoughts of attending law school. At night he sang and played drums in a jazz band, and when his G.I. Bill scholarship money ran out, he decided to forget about the law and make music his career. 
 
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 After moving to New York City in 1952, Mr. Hendricks worked as a clerk-typist and achieved a modicum of success on the side as a songwriter, but found little work as a performer. He was inspired to put lyrics to jazz recordings after he heard King Pleasure’s record of “Moody’s Mood for Love,” based on a James Moody saxophone solo on “I’m in the Mood for Love,” for which Eddie Jefferson had written new words. 
 
 “I was mesmerized,” Mr. Hendricks told The New York Times in 1982. “I’d been writing rhythm-and-blues songs, mostly for Louis Jordan. But I thought ‘Moody’s Mood for Love’ was so hip. You didn’t have to stop at 32 bars. You could keep going.” 
 
 He began collaborating with his fellow jazz singer Dave Lambert in 1953, and four years later their efforts paid off. “Dave Lambert said, ‘You know, before we starve, we ought to leave something to let people know we were here,’ ” he recalled in a 1996 NPR interview. “I said, ‘O.K., what do you think?’ He said, ‘Well, write some words to some Basie things, and I’ll arrange them, and we’ll sing them. And then if we starve to death, at least they’ll know, “Boy, great artists were here.” ’ ” 
 
 Mr. Hendricks proceeded to write words for 10 songs from the Count Basie band’s repertoire, based on the original recordings. Mr. Lambert wrote vocal arrangements. ABC-Paramount Records agreed to turn the concept into an album. 
 
 Mr. Hendricks and Mr. Lambert hired a rhythm section to accompany their vocals and a 12-piece choir to simulate the sound of the Basie band’s reed and brass sections. When the choir had trouble mastering the rhythmic nuances of the Basie style, Annie Ross, a British-born jazz singer who had made some vocalese recordings of her own, was brought in to coach it. 
 
 Ms. Ross’s efforts to imbue the studio vocalists with the proper jazz feeling proved futile, and they were let go. She ended up singing on the session with Mr. Lambert and Mr. Hendricks; their voices were multitracked, a rarity in those days. 
 
 The resulting album, “Sing a Song of Basie” (1958), was a hit. In the wake of its success, the three vocalists decided to make their partnership permanent. 
 
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 Lambert, Hendricks & Ross went on to record several more albums, including one with the Basie band itself for Roulette and one devoted to the music of Duke Ellington for Columbia. Although vocalese remained the group’s emphasis, its repertoire also included a number of songs for which Mr. Hendricks wrote the music as well as the lyrics, and many of their songs were used as springboards for their own flights of wordless improvisation. 
 
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 Annie Ross left the group in 1962 and was replaced briefly by Anne Marie Moss and then by Yolande Bavan, with whom Mr. Hendricks and Mr. Lambert recorded three albums for RCA Victor. The trio disbanded in 1964. Dave Lambert died in a highway accident in Connecticut two years later. 
 
 Mr. Hendricks moved to London with his family in 1968 but returned to the United States in 1973. For the next two years he wrote jazz reviews for The San Francisco Chronicle and taught classes in jazz history at the University of California, Berkeley, and California State University at Sonoma. 
 
 Mr. Hendricks’s stage show “Evolution of the Blues,” in which he traced the history of African-American music in song and verse, opened at the Broadway Theater in San Francisco in 1974 and ran for five years. His focus later shifted to Jon Hendricks & Company, a vocal quartet that carried on the tradition of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. 
 
 His wife, the former Judith Dickstein, who had first sung with him during their years in England, was a member of the group from its inception in the late ’70s and also served as his manager. (His first marriage, to Colleen Moore, ended in divorce.) Over the years its ranks also included Mr. Hendricks’s daughters Michele and Aria and his son Eric, as well as the singer Bobby McFerrin and the actor Avery Brooks. 
 
 Mr. Hendricks and Mr. McFerrin shared a Grammy in 1986 for “Another Night in Tunisia,” a track from the Manhattan Transfer album “Vocalese,” for which Mr. Hendricks wrote all the lyrics. 
 
 Judith Hendricks died in 2015. In addition to his daughter Aria, Mr. Hendricks is survived by his daughter Michele Hendricks; a son, Jon Hendricks Jr.; three grandchildren; and a niece, Bonnie Hopkins. 
 
 Mr. Hendricks remained active into the 21st century. He taught for many years at his alma mater, the University of Toledo. He was one of the three featured vocalists in the touring ensemble that performed Wynton Marsalis’s jazz oratorio “Blood on the Fields,” which received a Pulitzer Prize in 1997. 
 
 He continued to perform occasionally with Jon Hendricks & Company and periodically reunited with Ms. Ross. In 2015 the two of them were among the veteran jazz singers who recorded alongside a vocal group called the Royal Bopsters and performed with the group at Birdland in New York. 
 
 In his role as a teacher and a critic, Mr. Hendricks proved that he was adept at dealing with jazz in an analytical way. But he always maintained that words could go only so far in explaining the music’s importance and endurance. 
 
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 “I wrote the shortest jazz poem ever heard,” he once wrote by way of explaining his philosophy. “Nothin’ about huggin’ or kissin’. One word: ‘Listen.’ ” 

 TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Jon Hendricks, the pioneering jazz singer and lyricist who with the trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross popularized the "vocalese" singing style in which words were added to instrumental songs, has died. He was 96. 
 
 His daughter, Aria Hendricks, confirmed his death to the New York Times. She said he died Wednesday at a New York City hospital. 
 
 Hendricks found fame in the 1950s and '60s teaming with Dave Lambert and Annie Ross. Their interracial trio became one of the most celebrated jazz vocal groups ever, and among the latter-day stars they influenced were Joni Mitchell and Manhattan Transfer. 
 
 The trio's first album, "Sing a Song of Basie," won acclaim for its use of vocalese, in which the voices mimic the instrumental parts.Hendricks wrote the lyrics to existing Basie songs, and the three recorded their own voices in layers instead of using backup singers. 
 
 Others experimented with vocalese before Hendricks, but he is widely regarded as the father of the spirited singing style for popularizing it. In the 1980s, he collaborated with Manhattan Transfer on an album called "Vocalese" that won three Grammys, one for Hendricks himself. 
 
 He first teamed up with Lambert, a be-bop singer he admired, in the mid-1950s; the duo had a hit with "Four Brothers" and "Cloudburst." The two became a trio with the addition of Ross in 1957. The English-born Ross was already known for her own vocalese lyrics to Wardell Gray's music in the classic "Twisted." 
 
 In a 1997 Associated Press interview, Hendricks recalled that Lambert said, "Let's do something artistic so that the Earth will at least know we were here. Why don't you lyricize 10 Count Basie things and we'll see if we can record an album." 
 
 After trying out by recording a large group of singers, Hendricks recalled, they decided to instead create the harmonies by multitracking as a trio with Ross. After the group broke up in 1962, he pursued a solo career in London, worked as a jazz critic in San Francisco and released several solo albums. Ross also had success in a solo career; Lambert died in 1966. 
 
 Hendricks won a Grammy in 1986 for best male jazz vocal performance of 1985 for his work with Bobby McFerrin on "Another Night in Tunisia," a cut on Manhattan Transfer's "Vocalese." Hendricks wrote all the lyrics for the album, to music by Ray Charles, Quincy Jones and others. It was nominated for a near-record 12 Grammys and won three. 
 
 In 1997, he was three featured singers to perform Wynton Marsalis' "Blood on the Fields" on a CD and on tour in the United States and Europe. That same year the three-hour work, which tells the history of blacks in America, won the Pulitzer Prize for music. 
 
 But the fame of the trio that began recording nearly a half-century ago has not faded. Hendricks and Ross teamed up again in the late 1990s in a series of concerts. And "The All-Music Guide to Jazz" says Lambert, Hendricks and Ross "has yet to be topped as a jazz vocal group." 
 
 Mitchell, who rarely sings songs other than her own, recorded "Twisted" on her 1974 album, "Court and Spark," and "Centerpiece" on her 1975 "The Hissing of Summer Lawns." In a 1979 Down Beat magazine interview, she recalled hearing "Lambert, Hendricks and Ross: The Hottest New Sound in Jazz," as a teenager. 
 
 "In a way I've always considered that album to be my Beatles, because I learned every song off it...," she said. "I don't think there's another album that I know every song on, including my own!" 
 
 Hendricks got his start in amateur shows and at age 14 sang in Toledo nightclubs for two years with another future jazz great from his hometown, pianist Art Tatum, who gave him music lessons after school. 
 
 "I learned what I know from him," Hendricks told The Associated Press in a 2004 interview. 
 
 Yet, he was on his way to becoming a lawyer in 1950, singing in small clubs at night, when his wife asked if Hendricks could sing with be-bop pioneer and saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker at a concert in town. 
 
 Parker was impressed, telling Hendricks, "You ain't no lawyer. You're a jazz singer. You got to come to New York." Hendricks did, two years later. 
 
 Hendricks was born Sept. 16, 1921, in Newark, Ohio, and grew up in Toledo, one of 15 children of a preacher who hoped Hendricks would follow him into the ministry. 
 
 "I always felt like a traitor," Hendricks said. 
 
 As a boy, he took the "h'' out of his first name after he went to the movies and saw an actor named Jon. He thought it would make him stand out. 
 
 Following years of performing worldwide and living in New York, Hendricks returned to his hometown in 2000 to teach jazz history and vocal jazz at the University of Toledo. 
 
 A performer even as a teacher, he was known for his unending enthusiasm. On the first day of class he sang students the story of jazz, backed up by bass, drums and piano. Students gave him ovations by the dozen. 
 
 He also directed his own vocalese group in Toledo composed of students and local singers. They performed in France and Italy and with the Toledo Symphony. 
 
 Hendricks won awards worldwide. The World War II veteran was given France's highest honor, the French Legion of Honor in 2004, at a performance in Normandy to commemorate the 60th anniversary of D-Day. 
 
 He called that day one of his greatest thrills.
– Jon Hendricks, the pioneering jazz singer and lyricist who with the trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross popularized the "vocalese" singing style in which words were added to instrumental songs, has died. He was 96, AP reports. His daughter, Aria Hendricks, confirmed his death to the New York Times. She said he died Wednesday at a New York City hospital. Hendricks found fame in the 1950s and '60s teaming with Dave Lambert and Annie Ross. Their interracial trio became one of the most celebrated jazz vocal groups ever, and among the latter-day stars they influenced were Joni Mitchell and Manhattan Transfer. Hendricks was born Sept. 16, 1921, in Newark, Ohio, and grew up in Toledo, one of 15 children of a preacher who hoped Hendricks would follow him into the ministry. Lambert, Hendricks & Ross' first album, Sing a Song of Basie, won acclaim for its use of vocalese, in which the voices mimic the instrumental parts. Hendricks wrote the lyrics to existing Count Basie songs, and the three recorded their own voices in layers instead of using backup singers. Others experimented with vocalese before Hendricks, but he's widely regarded as the father of the spirited singing style for popularizing it. In the 1980s, he collaborated with Manhattan Transfer on an album called Vocalese that won three Grammys, one for Hendricks himself.