Collection: Clifford Jordan

Clifford Jordan grew up in Chicago's Bronzeville neighbourhood and attended Du Sable High School, where the music director Walter Henri Dyett produced an implausible concentration of jazz talent: Jordan's classmates included tenor saxophonists John Gilmore, Johnny Griffin, Von Freeman and Gene Ammons. He taught himself piano as a child and picked up tenor at thirteen, and by his early twenties was gigging around Chicago with Max Roach, Sonny Stitt and various R&B groups before moving to New York in 1957. His first album, "Blowing in from Chicago" (Blue Note, 1957), co-led with Gilmore and backed by Horace Silver, Curly Russell and Art Blakey, announced a saxophonist with a sound rooted in the Chicago tenor tradition but with enough harmonic ambition to hold his own in the company of the era's best rhythm sections. A run of Blue Note and Riverside albums followed, sideman stints with Horace Silver, J.J. Johnson, Kenny Dorham and Max Roach, and then a period in Charles Mingus's sextet for the 1964 European tour alongside Eric Dolphy, a trip whose intensity affected both players. He toured West Africa with Randy Weston for the US State Department in 1967 and spent time in Europe before returning to New York and eventually recording "Glass Bead Games" (Strata-East, 1974), a double album with two alternating quartets, Billy Higgins the only constant alongside Jordan, and Cedar Walton, Stanley Cowell, Sam Jones and Bill Lee rotating through. The title is from Hermann Hesse's 1943 novel, and the album is among the most collected Strata-East titles, a record that sits at the precise intersection of hard bop, spiritual jazz and the post-Coltrane avant-garde. He died on 27 March 1993, aged 61.