Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,660

This is the grave of Kidd Jordan.

Born in 1935 in Crowley, Louisiana, Jordan grew up in the rice farms of southwestern Louisiana. This was zydeco country musically. Clifton Chenier country. So that’s what Jordan grew up listening to, not necessarily jazz. But Illinois Jacquet also hailed from this area and Jacquet’s saxophone teacher started working with Jordan when the latter was just a kid. He took the saxophone like crazy, moved to Baton Rouge to attend Southern University, then went to New Orleans after graduation and embraced the modern jazz scene. Jacquet took an interest in the kid and taught him a lot about improvisation. The whole family was pretty musical anyway. His sister married Alvin Batiste and he and Jordan played in bands together. He started teaching music in New Orleans high schools in the mid 50s. Then Jordan heard Ornette Coleman and his life took a major turn.

Coleman’s improvisational techniques nearly caused a civil war in the jazz world. A few people realized he was a revolutionary figure that just changed the world. A lot of people loathed it, including many, many jazz musicians. But by the early 60s, jazz was moving forward toward free improvisation by the month, as one can hear just by listening to John Coltrane’s many recordings in order of creation. Jordan was one of those who felt Coleman was a complete genius. Much later, when asked why he didn’t just decide to make money, he went back to seeing Coleman and Coltrane live. He stated that after hearing Ornette’s 1958 album Something Else, he felt something new inside “and I just had to let it out.” Meanwhile, after seeing Coltrane play, it was “as if Coltrane put the Hallelujah on me. I was called.”

But Jordan was also deeply rooted in a lot of other musical traditions. For one, he became an important session and live saxophonist for a ton of R&B figures when they were in town. He played with Ray Charles and Big Joe Turner and Chuck Willis and all sorts of legends. He also became a go-to for famous female vocalists in that tradition. For Jordan, all of this could be brought into his own music. As he later stated:

I’ve played with some of the great female vocalists, from Gladys Knight to Aretha Franklin, or Big Maybelle, Little Esther, Lena Horne, and there’s an aesthetic in dealing with those people that a whole lot of people don’t get to. And the aesthetic from the Blues is a part of the thing that I want to have in my playing. I don’t care how out it gets.

Jordan never became famous really. But he became a key bridge between the New Orleans jazz tradition and the free jazz tradition. He taught Branford Marsalis when the kid was still a teenager. Donald Harrison too. Also Jon Batiste. And Trombone Shorty. His student Charles Joseph founded the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Jordan wrote songs for them. He occasionally played with the band too. Basically, Jordan was involved in an entire generation of New Orleans-based jazz musician. And yet, he was never as bound by New Orleans traditions as any of his students. Rather, Jordan always looked to push the music in new directions, with new sounds that respected the past and also respected the most outre avant music out there. Hardly anyone, with the exception of Sun Ra, could channel both of these traditions in the same music as well as Jordan.

In 1975, Jordan founded the Improvisation Arts Quintet, one of the key jazz groups of the 70s, and maybe the most important based in New Orleans. It included Alvin Fielder, Clyde Kerr, Elton Heron, Kent Jordan (not sure if he is a relation, but he’s not a sibling at least), and of course Kidd Jordan. He and Fiedler would have a long and productive career together over many albums.

Meanwhile, Jordan later in his career did a bunch of work with William Parker, the great shaman bassist who is one of the most important New York-based musicians in the last half-century. I highly recommend the Palm of Soul album that the two of them did with the drummer Hamid Drake. That was recorded just days after Jordan lost most of what he owned during Hurricane Katrina. Parker also made sure Jordan got his respect from the free jazz community. Jordan was the winner of the Vision Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. This is the festival that Parker and his wife, the dancer Patricia Nicholson run. Jordan liked to joke about driving his audience away with his music. Once at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, he noted as he started his well-attended set, “We’ve got a pretty good crowd. Let’s see how many of you are left at the end.” Parker worked with Fielder and Jordan together over the years as well, often adding the pianist Joel Futterman, who Jordan also recorded a good bit with over the years.

Over the years, while Jordan had few recordings as a bandleader until the late 90s, he played on albums by Louisiana legends such as Professor Longhair, with great jazz artists such as Fred Anderson, and with R.E.M., as he did the sax parts on Out of Time. But mostly, Jordan taught at Southern. That’s what made ends meet. He taught there for 34 years before retiring in 2006. At that time, he headed the school’s Jazz Studies program. He was also popular in Europe. In 1985, the French Ministry of Culture named him a chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

As one of the living kings of New Orleans music, Jordan’s work got picked up by David Simon on Treme. First, Simon used one of the songs on Palm of Soul in the show and then Jordan himself got a guest appearance. Treme is not one of Simon’s most successful projects because he simply never understood New Orleans like he understands Baltimore and Yonkers and the urban politics of the northeast. He was a tourist making a show about he place he loved. That meant the show was good, not great. Still worth watching. One of the benefits of this was giving publicity to the city’s living legends such as Jordan.

Jordan died in 2023. He was 87 years old.

Let’s listen to some Kidd Jordan.

Absolute 100% legend.

Kidd Jordan is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana.

If you would like this series to visit some of the greats Jordan played with, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frank Sinatra is in Palm Springs, California and Nancy Wilson is in Cathedral City, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.