Collection: Duke Jordan

Duke Jordan took his nickname at fourteen from the musician he idolised most. As Irving Sidney Jordan, raised in Brooklyn and already obsessively collecting Duke Ellington records, he joined Coleman Hawkins at Kelly's Stable and spent a year with Al Cooper's Savoy Sultans before Charlie Parker heard him playing with guitarist Teddy Walters and asked him to join his quintet. The 1947-48 Parker quintet, with Miles Davis on trumpet, Tommy Potter on bass and Max Roach on drums, produced some of the most collected bebop sessions on record: the Dial dates that yielded "Dewey Square", "Bongo Bop", "Bird of Paradise" and the famous eight-bar piano introduction Jordan played on "Embraceable You", an introduction Leonard Feather later described in liner notes as one of the great unheralded moments in bebop piano. Jordan wrote "Jordu" in 1953, and when Clifford Brown adopted it into his repertoire the following year it became a standard, turning up in the Brown-Roach Quintet recordings and remaining there ever since. What happened next is one of jazz's more unusual stories. Jordan spent time accompanying Sonny Stitt and Stan Getz, recorded his own sessions for Signal and Prestige, contributed to the soundtrack of Roger Vadim's 1959 French film "Les Liaisons Dangereuses", and then largely disappeared from recording for most of the 1960s, driving a taxi in New York. He reconnected with the recording world through SteepleChase in 1973, moved permanently to Copenhagen in 1978, and recorded prolifically in trio and quintet settings for the label until 1985.