Irving Sidney "Duke" Jordan (April 1, 1922 – August 8, 2006) was regarded as one of the great early American bebop pianists and composers. The sound that he helped to create in the post-war era was something new in the American landscape, and it remains a cornerstone of jazz.
Jordan was born in New York and raised in Brooklyn where he attended Boys High School. He studied classical music privately at an early age and performed with the trombonist Steve Pulliam at the New York World's Fair in 1939. Before his 21st birthday he was playing piano in big bands, including the Al Cooper's Savoy Sultans, the house orchestra at the Savoy Ballroom, in its day the world’s most famous dance hall. Gillespie once called the Savoy Sultans “the swingiest band there ever was.” An imaginative and gifted pianist, Jordan also worked with Roy Eldridge's Big Band in 1946.
While performing at the Three Deuces in New York in 1946 he was heard by Charlie Parker, who invited him to join a newly formed group with Miles Davis, Max Roach and Tommy Potter. He participated in Parker's Dial sessions in late 1947 that produced "Dewey Square", "Bongo Bop", "Bird of Paradise", and the ballad "Embraceable You". His work with Parker, recorded for the Dial and Savoy labels, soared with a lilting intensity. It was hard-driving and lyrical, heady and heartfelt, said Ira Gitler, a jazz critic who heard Mr. Jordan and Parker in 1947, at the Onyx Club and the Three Deuces, two long-vanished nightclubs on West 52nd Street in Manhattan. A handful of recordings from 1947 and 1948 are considered masterpieces. They include “Crazeology,” and “Scrapple From the Apple.”
He played with Parker regularly until autumn 1948 and occasionally thereafter. He also played with Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons (1950-51). Engagements with Stan Getz (1949, 1952-3) proved unsatisfying because he was given few opportunities to play solos. In 1952 he married the talented jazz singer Sheila Jordan, who often said that she loved Charlie Parker so much that she married his piano player. Their interracial marriage was unusual in the 1950’s, when segregation remained legal, and miscegenation was a crime in some states. The marriage did not last long, but their union produced a daughter, Tracey J. Jordan, who became a music promoter.
Jordan, like many of his contemporaries, developed a heroin habit and by the mid 1960’s, was reduced to driving a taxicab in New York. By the 1970's he rehabilitated himself and resumed his career with a performance in New York (1972).Later he toured Scandinavia (1973-4, 1977-8) and Japan (1976,1982). He had began a new life as a leader of trios and quartets in Copenhagen, where he settled permanently in 1978.
He recorded more than 30 albums for the Danish label Steeple Chase Records and performed in concerts and at jazz festivals worldwide. His first record date for the company was in 1973. He was reported not to have changed his style over the course of his career.
Duke Jordan died on August 8,2006 in Valby, Denmark, a suburb of Copenhagen. He was 84, and he had lived in self-imposed exile from the United States since 1978, continuing to perform in the musical tradition he helped create.
(Edited from New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Wikipedia & New York Times)
