• Home
  • About
    • Doug Ramsey
    • Rifftides
    • Contact
  • Purchase Doug’s Books
    • Poodie James
    • Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond
    • Jazz Matters
    • Other Works
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal
  • rss

Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Duke Jordan

August 11, 2006 by Doug Ramsey

Duke Jordan died on Tuesday in Copenhagen. The news summons thoughts of the beauty of his piano playing and the gentleness of his personality. Jordan’s touch, harmonic sensitivity and gift for the creation of melodic lines made him a favorite colleague of Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Gene Ammons and Chet Baker, to name a few who benefited from his artistry. He had worked earlier with Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins and the Savoy Sultans, but his playing on Parker’s 1947 recordings on the Dial label, when he was twenty-five, brought him his first wide recognition. His introductions to ballads were often little masterpieces. The four bars leading into Parker’s “Embraceable You” constitute one of the most exquisite moments in all of recorded jazz, and one of the most imitated.
In the days of three-minute records, Jordan rarely had more than sixteen bars of solo time in Parker’s quintet or sextet sessions, but he invariably constructed short stories with beginnings, middles and endings, never filling the time with random improvisation. An example of his cogency is in the middle of “Quasimodo,” which happens to also be “Embraceable You” under the guise of an original Parker melody line. Both of those pieces are on this CD.
A prodigious composer, Jordan’s most famous piece is “Jordu,” a staple of the modern jazz repertoire. “No Problem” may be a close second. He wrote it for the sound track of Roger Vadim’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He was also the co-composer, as Jacques Marray, of the soundtrack for that 1959 film, with contributions by Thelonious Monk. After he moved to Copenhagen in 1978, Jordan recorded copiously as a leader and with Chet Baker, Doug Raney, Clifford Jordan and others.
The times I was privileged to be around him, Jordan was quiet, easy in his skin and earnest. He was the pianist for Sam Most’s 1976 album Mostly Flute, which had Tal Farlow on guitar, bassist Sam Jones and drummer Billy Higgins. In the liner notes, I recounted a recording session incident that typified Duke’s attitude.

“The More I See You” is taken at a bright medium-up tempo. Duke’s introduction recalls some of the gems he recorded with Parker, and he has one of the best solos of the date. In the control room, heads were shaking in admiration during this one, and afterward when Jordan walked in asking, “Was that all right?” everyone broke up.

Duke Jordan, dead at eighty-four.

Related

Filed Under: Main

Comments

  1. Don Frese says

    August 11, 2006 at 9:14 pm

    Thanks for the tribute to this wonderful musician.
    I once heard a story that when he was with Stan Getz, Getz and Jimmy
    Raney would break out laughing and shake their heads after one of
    Jordan’s 4 or 8 bar intros; they figured they could play a dozen
    choruses apiece and not come up with a melodic idea as good as what
    Jordan had just played.
    For an extension of his Embraceable You intro, I have always liked this
    trio version, a solo that seems almost inevitable.
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000003EKF/sr=1-26/qid=1155306209/ref=s
    r_1_26/103-0700896-7719842?ie=UTF8&s=music
    Another favorite: Deacon Joe, a magnificent blues with crystalline
    opening and closing solos by Jordan, and Dizzy Reece’s finest recorded
    solo from this:
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000008BFX/sr=1-2/qid=1155306501/ref=sr
    _1_2/103-0700896-7719842?ie=UTF8&s=music
    Don Frese

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

Subscribe to RiffTides by Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

Archives

Recent Comments

  • Rob D on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • W. Royal Stokes on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Larry on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Lucille Dolab on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Donna Birchard on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

Doug’s Picks

We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

As Rifftides readers have undoubtedly noticed, it has been a long time since we posted. We are creating a new post in hopes  that it will open the way to resumption of frequent reports as part of the artsjournal.com mission to keep you up to date on jazz and other matters. Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s stunning new trio album […]

Recent Listening: The New David Friesen Trio CD

David Friesen Circle 3 Trio: Interaction (Origin) Among the dozens of recent releases that deserve serious attention, a few will get it. Among those those receiving it here is bassist David Friesen’s new album.  From the Portland, Oregon, sinecure in which he thrives when he’s not touring the world, bassist Friesen has been performing at […]

Monday Recommendation: Dominic Miller

Dominic Miller Absinthe (ECM) Guitarist and composer Miller delivers power and subtlety in equal measure. Abetted by producer Manfred Eicher’s canny guidance and ECM’s flawless sound and studio presence, Miller draws on inspiration from painters of France’s impressionist period. His liner essay emphasizes the importance to his musical conception of works by Cezanne, Renoir, Lautrec, […]

Recent Listening: Dave Young And Friends

Dave Young, Lotus Blossom (Modica Music) Young, the bassist praised by Oscar Peterson for his “harmonic simpatico and unerring sense of time” when he was a member of Peterson’s trio, leads seven gifted fellow Canadians. His beautifully recorded bass is the underpinning of a relaxed session in which his swing is a force even during […]

Recent Listening: Jazz Is Of The World

Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren, Mare Nostrum III (ACT) This third outing by Mare Nostrum continues the international trio’s close collaboration in a series of albums that has enjoyed considerable success. With three exceptions, the compositions in this installment are by the members of Mare Nostrum. It opens with one the French accordionist Galliano […]

Monday Recommendation: Thelonious Monk’s Works In Full

Kimbrough, Robinson, Reid, Drummond: Monk’s Dreams(Sunnyside) The subtitle of this invaluable 6-CD set is The Complete Compositions Of Thelonious Sphere Monk. By complete, Sunnyside means that the box contains six CDs with 70 tunes that Monk wrote beginning in the early years when his music was generally assumed to be an eccentric offshoot of bebop, […]

More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

Related

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in