Guitar | b. 1959

Stanley Jordan was born on July 31, 1959 in Chicago, Illinois, started classical piano lessons at six, discovered Jimi Hendrix in his early teens and switched to guitar, and then spent years working out how to translate piano technique to the fretboard. His “touch technique,” an advanced form of two-handed tapping in which both hands hammer and tap the fretboard independently without plucking or strumming, allows him to play two fully independent melodic lines simultaneously: melody in one hand, complete chord accompaniment in the other. He developed the approach largely in isolation, with piano training as his primary reference. A self-produced album “Touch Sensitive” appeared in 1983, and after a performance at the 1984 Kool Jazz Festival led to an appearance opening for Wynton Marsalis at Avery Fisher Hall, Bruce Lundvall signed him to Blue Note Records as the label’s first signing after its relaunch. “Magic Touch” (Blue Note, 1985), which sold over 400,000 copies and spent fifty-one weeks at the top of the Billboard Jazz chart, was one of the most commercially successful jazz albums of the decade and a cornerstone of Blue Note’s modern revival. Four more Blue Note albums followed through 1991. He has continued recording and performing across a long career and remains active.