Collection: Stanley Jordan

Stanley Jordan started on classical piano at six, discovered Jimi Hendrix, picked up guitar, and spent years working out how to apply piano technique to the fretboard. The standard guitar technique uses one hand to fret a note and the other to pluck or strum; Jordan’s approach eliminates the second action entirely, both hands tapping and hammering on the fretboard simultaneously. The result is a guitarist who can play two fully independent melodic lines at once, melody in one hand and a complete chord accompaniment in the other, with no strumming, no picks, and no compromise between the two. He developed the technique in isolation, partly because he had very little to reference beyond his own piano training. He was playing in soul and rock bands in his early career, released a self-produced album “Touch Sensitive” in 1983, and was busking in Washington Square Park in New York City when the right person heard him. After a performance at the 1984 Kool Jazz Festival, he opened for Wynton Marsalis at Avery Fisher Hall. Bruce Lundvall, who had just relaunched Blue Note Records, signed Jordan as his first signing in the new Blue Note era. “Magic Touch” (Blue Note, 1985) sold over 400,000 copies worldwide, an extraordinary figure for an instrumental jazz album, spent fifty-one weeks at number one on the Billboard Jazz chart, and was Grammy-nominated. It remains one of the most commercially successful Blue Note albums of the modern era. He recorded four more Blue Note albums through 1991 before moving to Arista and then building his own catalogue.