Clifford Jordan

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Clifford Laconia Jordan (September 2, 1931, Chicago - March 27, 1993, Manhattan) was an inside/outside sax player who played with Eric Dolphy in the Charles Mingus Sextet of 1964 which extensively toured Europe.

Jordan gigged around Chicago with Max Roach, Sonny Stitt, and some R&B groups before moving to New York in 1957. Jordan immediately made a strong impression, leading three albums for Blue Note (including a meeting with fellow tenor saxophonist John Gilmore) and toured with Horace Silver (1957-1958), J. J. Johnson (1959-1960), Kenny Dorham (1961-1962), and Max Roach (1962-1964). Jordan also recorded with all of these musicians.

Jordan was a powerful, deeply thoughtful Chicago tenor player who, though sought after by pianist Horace Silver and praised by fellow saxophonist Sonny Rollins, was fated to be often overlooked by general followers of the music. He had little interest in hard bop, funk or fusion, and his muse did not tempt him, like John Coltrane's, to scale Olympian heights. Not even his invaluable contribution to what may be Silver's most creative and satisfying Blue Note recording, Further Explorations By the Horace Silver Quintet (Blue Note, 1958), a documentation of a group which also featured trumpeter Art Farmer, one of the few Silver recordings not to be reissued as a Rudy Van Gelder remaster.

After performing in Europe with bassist Charles Mingus and alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy, with whom he recorded the well known jazz clasic "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" in 1964, Jordan worked mostly as a leader, but tended to be overlooked since he was not overly influential or a pacesetter in the avant-garde. A reliable player, Jordan toured Europe several times, was in a quartet headed by Cedar Walton in 1974-1975, and during his last years, toured occasionally with vocalist Carmen McRae and led a big band.

Clifford Jordan recorded as a leader for Blue Note, Riverside, Jazzland, Atlantic (a little-known album of Leadbelly tunes), Vortex, Strata-East, Muse, Frontier Records, SteepleChase, Criss Cross, Bee Hive, DIW, Milestone, and Mapleshade. The single recording that best represents this gentle giant is 1974's Glass Bead Games, a two- volume session on which Jordan leads two quartets—the first with drummer Billy Higgins, pianist Stanley Cowell, and bassist Bill Lee; the second retaining Higgins while replacing Cowell with Cedar Walton and Lee with Sam Jones.

Once reissued as a costly, incomplete Japanese release, and an unauthorized issue in the UK, early in 2007 Jordan's widow authorized an American release of the complete session. Not only does the recording bear out the acclaim bestowed upon it by Rollins, confirming Jordan's own mastery of the horn and establishing him as one of its unique and compelling voices; a comparison with Coltrane's A Love Supreme (Impulse, 1964), an inarguable influence on Jordan, was apparently intentional.