BLP 4046

Duke Jordan - Flight to Jordan

Released - May 1961

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, August 4, 1960
Dizzy Reece, trumpet; Stanley Turrentine, tenor sax; Duke Jordan, piano; Reginald Workman, bass; Art Taylor, drums.

tk.4 Flight To Jordan
tk.8 Si-Joya
tk.18 Split Quick
tk.19 Squawkin'
tk.27 Starbrite
tk.29 Deacon Joe

Session Photos

Art Taylor - August 4, 1960

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Flight to Jordan	Duke Jordan	04/08/1960
Star Brite	Duke Jordan	04/08/1960
Squawkin'	Duke Jordan	04/08/1960
Side Two
Deacon Joe	Duke Jordan	04/08/1960
Split Quick	Duke Jordan	04/08/1960
Si-Joya (No Problem)	Duke Jordan	04/08/1960

Liner Notes

"JORDAN. Duke. Piano. Born Brooklyn, N. Y., 1922. An early bop pianist. a swinging one, still very much a part of jazz."

This very brief biography, from Barry Ulanov's A Handbook Of Jazz (Viking press, 1957), is Duke's only individual mention, as far as I have been able to determine, in any American text-book on jazz other than the Encyclopedia. In all the other books you will find either no mention at all, or passing references lumped together with several other names (my own Book of Jazz and John Wilson's Collector's Jazz were guilty in this respect). Yet Irving Sydney Jordan, son of Brooklyn, has been paying his dues as a professional musician since shortly before World War II, and those of us who have heard him intermittently during most of the past two decades can hardly be unaware by now that this is no run-of-the-mill musician.

Duke was born of musically inclined but non-professional parents who, when he was eight, placed his musical education in the hands of a private teacher. He continued to study piano until he was 16, playing in the school band at Brooklyn Automotive High. After graduation in 1939 he joined the septet of trombonist Steve Pulliam, a group that included Jimmy Nottingham, now a top studio trumpet man. This combo, appearing in an amateur contest at the New York World's Fair that summer, won a prize and earned the attention of John Hammond, who impressed by the teen-aged efforts of young Mr. Jordan. The unit stayed together for a year or two. after which Duke entered what was almost certainly the most important formative phase of his career.

Jazz was undergoing a quiet but vital upheaval in 1941. Around the time when Duke Jordan went to work at a club called Murrain's, on Seventh Avenue in Harlem, the experiments that were to crystallize in the form of bebop had gotten underway at several uptown clubs. The group in which Duke now worked was led, in effect, by the tenor saxophonist Ray Abrams, but it was under the nominal leadership of Clark Monroe, the veteran night club host who was involved in the operation of a series of clubs, including his own Uptown House where Charlie Parker first worked in New York.

Thus, though Duke gained his first experience in jazz through the records of Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum and their contemporaries, he was exposed early to the work of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, as well as to Gillespie and Parker. As I recall it, when bop burst full-fledged on the downtown scene, Duke was one of the very first to play in what was then a revolutionary new style; in fact the only other bop pianists of any note on the 52nd Street horizon, aside from Powell himself, were AJ Haig, Billy Taylor and George Wallington.

For a while Duke played with Coleman Hawkins at Kelly's Stable, in a combo similar to the one that had been organized by Clark Monroe. After this he returned to the uptown front, working for a year with a "jump band" called the Savoy Sultans, which functioned as a part-time house band at the late lamented Savoy Ballroom. But it was when he was downtown again, playing in the trio of guitarist Teddy Walters at the Three Deuces, that Charlie Parker was sufficiently impressed by Duke to hire him for his Quintet. Duke worked for Bird during this period (1946-8), the other members of the group being Miles Davis, Max Roach and Tommy Potter.

"Working with Bird a fantastic experience," says Duke. "He was such an inspiration — and often I heard him play things that were greater than anything he could do in a recording studio. My greatest regret was that I missed a chance to go to Europe With him. Bird had no work at one time, so I took the chance to go to Detroit with Paul Boscomb, and while I was there Bird was invited to France for the first jazz festival. As it turned out, I didn't get another opportunity to visit Europe until 1956, when I went to Sweden with Rolf Ericson.

During the Bird years Duke played a few months with Roy Eldridge, recording on a big band date with Roy. Later, after leaving Bird, he worked with the Stan Getz combo in 1949. During the 1950s he free-lanced around New York, gigging with Oscar Pettiford, with off-night groups at Birdland, and also spending some time with Gene Ammons' band. In 1958 he was in Europe for a time with Kenny Dorham, Don Byas and Kenny Clarke.

It was about 1954 that Duke began to develop as a composer. His first and best known original, Jordu, recorded by the Max Roach-Clifford Brown quintet soon after, Duke cut it as a sideman with a Julius Watkins group for a ten-inch LP on Blue Note. He has written many attractive lines since then, of which the most successful have been the title tune of this album, already very popular in English jazz circles, and Scotch Blues, which was recorded by Kenny Burrell (Blue Note 1596).

This is the first album composed entirely of Duke Jordan compositions. To interpret his work Duke used a carefully selected combo of mutually sympathetic sidemen. Dizzy Reece had already impressed him through the Blue Note LPs under Dizzy's own name; more recently he played a few nights with Dizzy, at the Left Bank in midtown Manhattan, in a combo that also included Reggie Workman, the promising young bassist on these sides. Stanley Turrentine, a 26-year-old tenor man from Pittsburgh, worked with Ray Charles and Earl Bostic, but is best known in jazz through his dates in the past couple of years with Max Roach. Arthur Taylor, a 31 -year-old New Yorker, has been on many Blue Note scenes with Bud Powell et al.

Flight To Jordan is a minor-mode theme melodically patterned along the lines of the spiritual Joshua Fit de Battle ob Jericho. The 32-bar chorus has an A-B-A-B pattern. Veteran Jordan fans will recall that Duke recorded it originally for a now-defunct label. The new treatment has a brighter tempo and maintains a consistent groove throughout the solos by Reece, Turrentine and Jordan. The mood established by Turrentine puts to valuable use both his tonal reflection of Coleman Hawkins and his stylistic debt to Sonny Rollins. (He names Hawkins, Rollins and Byas as his favorites and early influences.)

Of Starbrite Duke says, "I noticed that Dizzy has a fine, big sound on slow tunes, so I wrote this with him in mind." Dizzy has the spotlight throughout the first outlining the simple, pretty, largely diatonic melody. Duke's own is gentle, pensive and relaxed, leading logically to a sinuous tenor passage in which Turrentine reveals the breathiness and the warm, tender quality of a Ben Webster. Dizzy takes over again for the close, displaying his fine sustained tones and well-controlled vibrato all the way to the tasteful and unpretentious coda.

Squawkin' was inspired by an incident that occurred one day not far from Duke's home: "I saw a scene on the street in Brooklyn, a cab-driver and some other cats squawking away, and I thought of writing a theme to express the mood." It's a 12-bar blues with Turrentine at his most fluently impressive, and it cooks all the way, with Dizzy muted and Duke playing long, flowing single-note lines.

Deacon Joe, the longest (and, to these ears, the most impressive) track in the album, was also inspired in this manner, when Duke passed by a storefront church in Brooklyn. There is in this performance none of the pseudo-funk. crypto-gospel music of which we have heard so much during the past year. After Duke's two-chorus opening solo we hear the theme expressed as a simple, blues-drenched unison line. Dizzy at his most lyrical offers a solo that shows the qualities of a truly sensitive musician: simplicity and complexity, direct rhythmic statement and oblique implication, are ingeniously interwoven to produce a performance that rank among his best on record to date. Duke, too, shows the depth of his feeling for the blues and even ends the performance with a delightfully basic four-bar tag, complete with C.13th-Flat-5 final chord.

Si-Joya has no deep significance in its title. Duke confesses that he doesn't know Spanish too well and merely wanted to convey this flavor in the name of the tune, which, as you'd expect, is a Latin:type affair. Opening with sticks-on-cymbal by A. T., it progresses to the exposition of the theme followed by solos from Turrentine, Reece and Jordan. Notice, throughout this track — and for that matter throughout the entire album — the steady and supple support offered by A. T., who has been an intermittent associate of Duke's for some years and was a member of the group in which Duke visited Scandinavia. "I just wanted a real happy feeling for this one," says Duke, and there's no doubt that he achieved his objective.

It is good to find Duke Jordan so well represented by an album that displays his dual talents as composer and pianist. For those who are reading these notes before deciding whether to embark on the Right to Jordan, may I recommend that you get your passport validated right now.

—LEONARD FEATHER
(Author of the New Encyclopedia of Jazz)

Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT FLIGHT TO JORDAN

The lengthy career of Irving "Duke" Jordan (1922-2006) was, at least as far as his American audience could tell, a perfect example of the too-common on again, off again existence that plagues far too many great musicians. The previous appearances on Blue Note that Leonard Feather mentions — with Julius Watkins in 1955 and Kenny Burrell in 1958 (plus the 1957 Louis Smith master that Blue Note purchased from Transition) — reflect Jordan's sporadic activity generally during the decade. Flight to Jordan was taped during a brief flurry of recording with the label that also saw the pianist accompanying Tina Brooks on True Blue and Dizzy Reece (with Stanley Turrentine featured) in a session issued decades later as Comin' On. Two additional sessions under Jordan's name for the Charlie Parker Records label followed shortly thereafter, leading to another long stretch of obscurity in which additional recordings under his name did not appear for over a decade.

Then Europe discovered both Duke Jordan the pioneering modern piano player, whose introductions and accompaniments on classic recordings by Charlie Parker and Stan Getz still set the standard, and Duke Jordan the uncommonly gifted composer who made his first major statement here. Jordan had given strong evidence of his writing skills earlier, especially on his self-titled album for Signal in 1955; but this collection, with its well-chosen range of moods and the extremely personal conceptions of the two-horn soloists, made a particularly strong case for Jordan's standing alongside contemporaries Elmo Hope and George Wallington as an inspired if less-appreciated composer/pianist from the fertile generation headed by Monk, Dameron, and Powell.

The numerous Jordan albums that appeared in the 1970s and '80s, primarily on the Danish SteepleChase label, emphasized solo and trio settings, and focused on a growing Jordan body of work that ultimately featured over two-dozen melodies. A look at a Duke Jordan discography will suggest a far larger output, as he was in the habit of renaming tunes in order to assert ownership of material where copyrights had either previously been given away or never established. As a result, each of the original compositions in this collection can be found on later Jordan albums under alternate titles.

Both of the previously recorded pieces here remain among Jordan's signature melodies. "Flight to Jordan," a wittily infectious exercise in call and response, had been introduced on Signal (the "now-defunct label" that Feather references) in a quintet featuring two of the pianist's closest and most longstanding associates, trombonist Eddie Bert and baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne. It presaged other Jordan tunes with "flight" in the title, and while his own subsequent versions tended to employ the original name, there is a 1979 solo rendition called "Jordanish."

"Si-Joya" reminds us that Jordan was practicing titular manipulation long before his later resurgence. The melody is actually "No Problem," which Jordan composed for the soundtrack of the 1959 French film Les Liaisons Dangereuse, though there are enough variations in the chord voicings and new melodic turns in Reece's sterling lead to have allowed the composer to claim this version as a new variation on a recent theme. The melody, which has tended to be swung hard at a faster tempo in its several cover versions, works very well in this moodier Latin setting.

The beautiful "Star Brite," oddly enough, almost shares a title with a Blue Note album by the trumpeter who inspired it, although Reece's Star Bright includes neither this tune nor one of a similar name. Jordan's "Star Brite" received the new name "Tall Grass" when he revived it on a 1975 quintet date, despite the latter title having already been employed for a different ballad melody that Jordan recorded on a 1962 Charlie Parker disc. To add to the confusion, the earlier "Tall Grass" resurfaced as "My Queen Is Home to Stay" on a 1979 Jordan trio session that also included the remaining originals on this date appearing, mostly under new appellations.

"Squawkin"' (later "Light Foot"), with its suggestion of Oscar Pettiford's "Blues in the Closet" in its opening phrase, and the slower and funkier "Deacon Joe" (aka "Deacon's Blues"), are two different yet equally convincing takes on the blues. The album's most challenging form, the 38-bar (10-10-8-10) "Split Quick," became known as "The Fuzz," and was also heard in a quartet version featuring the composer and Chet Baker. "Diamond Stud," one of two bonus tracks that first appeared on the original 1987 CD reissue of Flight to Jordan, was also taped by a trio in 1979 trio under its original title, yet had morphed into "Parisian Hop" when Jordan included it on his final solo date in 1993.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2006