Ken Nordine

Ken Nordine (April 13, 1920 in Cherokee, Iowa - February 16, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois) was an American voice-over and recording artist. Ken Nordine became wealthy doing voice-overs for television and radio commercials. But he found his passion in using his dramatic baritone to riff surreally on colors, time, spiders, bullfighting, outer space and dozens of other subjects, improvising poetry in a silky voice to cool, vibrant musical accompaniment, creating a form of storytelling that he called “Word jazz,” and that brought him renown on radio and led to collaborations with Fred Astaire, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, Laurie Anderson, Sonny Rollins, Billy Vaughn, Tom Waits or Dead Man Ray to name a few.