The piano player at a Chicago club called Jump Town wasn’t thrilled about letting the pretty blond vocalist from Milwaukee do a few numbers.

“Nah, I don’t like to play for girl singers,” he told her friend. “They never know what they want to sing and when they tell you their key, it’s usually in the key of Z.”

After a drink with 18-year-old Jackie Cain, he relented. The two performed “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe” and, as Cain later recalled, “It broke up the place. The club went nuts.”

Jackie Cain and the initially reluctant Roy Kral went on to become one of the most enduring duos in jazz, a married couple whose ease with each other infused more than 30 albums and enchanted club audiences over five decades.

Known for her swinging blend of bop and ballads, Cain died Monday at her home in Montclair, N.J. She was 86.

Her health had been declining since a stroke in 2010, said James Gavin, a family friend.

Cain’s husband died in 2002. The couple, professionally known as Jackie and Roy, had been married for 53 years.

“Their work had a delicacy, a subtlety and a joy to it,” jazz critic Nat Hentoff told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “They were having fun, and it was infectious.”

Cain was most famed for her fast-paced renditions of standards like “Mountain Greenery” as well as her takes on songs that were relatively avant-garde. Jackie and Roy were the first big artists to record “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” a lyrical lament by writer Fran Landesman that riffed on T.S. Eliot’s line, “April is the cruellest month.”

She and Kral were also among the early adopters of “vocalese” – the singing of lyrics to jazz instrumentals.

“We always wanted to sound smart and in the groove, not sticky-sweet,” Cain said in a 2009 interview with jazz writer Marc Myers.

On his JazzWax website, Myers wrote that Cain “altered the direction of club singing from bluesy to breezy.”

Born in Milwaukee on May 22, 1928, Jacqueline Ruth Cain sang on local radio as a child and was part of the music-store-sponsored “Wurlitzer Melody Kids.” As a teenager, she sang at parties and clubs.

“I had strictly a Sophie Tucker style at that time,” she said. “They used to play up that little-girl-with-a-big-voice stuff.”

After she met Kral, her career took off. The two appeared on early Chicago TV and worked in “Bop for the People,” a septet led by saxophonist Charlie Ventura.

With Ventura, they scored their first big hit, a be-bop arrangement of “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”

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