Louis Jordan
Louis Thomas Jordan was an American saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and bandleader who was popular from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Known as "the King of the Jukebox", he earned his highest profile towards the end of the swing era.
Specializing in the alto sax, Jordan played all forms of the saxophone, as well as piano and clarinet. He also was a talented singer with great comedic flair, and fronted his own band for more than twenty years. He duetted with some of the biggest solo singing stars of his time, including Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong.
Jordan began his career in big-band swing jazz in the 1930s, coming to the public's attention as part of Chick Webb's hard swinging band, though he became better known as an innovative popularizer of jump blues—a swinging, up-tempo, dance-oriented hybrid of jazz, blues and boogie-woogie. Typically performed by smaller bands consisting of five or six players, jump music featured shouted, highly syncopated vocals and earthy, comedic lyrics on contemporary urban themes. It strongly emphasized the rhythm section of piano, bass and drums; after the mid-1940s, this mix was often augmented by electric guitar. Jordan's band also pioneered the use of the electronic organ.
With his dynamic bands that he called The Tympany Five no matter how many musicians were in it, Jordan mapped out the main parameters of the classic R&B, urban blues and early rock-and-roll genres with a series of highly influential 78-rpm discs released by Decca Records. These recordings presaged many of the styles of black popular music of the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s and exerted a strong influence on many leading performers in these genres. Many of his records were produced by Milt Gabler who, in his later production work, played Jordan's music for Bill Haley as Haley wanted to transition from country & western to rock 'n' roll resulting in Haley's huge hit, "Rock Around the Clock".
Jordan was also an actor and a film personality. He appeared in 14 three-minute Soundies filmed for "movie jukeboxes" of the 1940s. He also worked as a specialty act in the Hollywood theatrical features Follow the Boys and Swing Parade of 1946. His very successful musical short Caldonia prompted three more feature films, all starring Jordan and his band: Beware; Reet, Petite and Gone; and Look-Out Sister.
Jordan ranks fifth in the list of the most successful African-American recording artists according to Joel Whitburn's analysis of Billboard magazine's R&B chart, and was the most popular rhythm and blues artist with his jump blues recordings of the pre-rock n' roll era. Though comprehensive sales figures are not available, Jordan had at least four million-selling hits during his career and regularly topped the R&B "race" charts, reaching Number 1 a total of 18 times, with 113 weeks in that spot over the years. He was also one of the first black recording artists to achieve significant crossover in popularity with the predominantly white mainstream American audience, having simultaneous top ten hits on the pop charts several times.
Early life
Jordan was born on July 8, 1908, in Brinkley, Arkansas. His father, James Aaron Jordan, was a music teacher and bandleader for the Brinkley Brass Band and the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. His mother, Adell, died when Louis was young and his grandmother, Maggie Jordan and his aunt, Lizzie Reid raised him. Under the tutelage of his father, Jordan began studying clarinet at age seven, then saxophone. In his teens, he joined the Rabbit Foot Minstrels Louis Jordan studied at Arkansas Baptist College where he majored in music.Career
By the late 1920s Jordan was playing professionally. In the early 1930s, he played in Philadelphia and New York City with Charlie Gaines, as well as recording with Clarence Williams and his Blue Rhythm Boys and was briefly a member of the Stuff Smith orchestra. With Chick Webb's orchestra, he sang and played alto saxophone. In 1938, he started a band that recorded a year later as the Tympany Five.Jordan's first band, drawn mainly from members of the Jesse Stone band, was a nine-piece group that he reduced to a sextet after being hired for a residency at the Elks Rendezvous club at 464 Lenox Avenue in Harlem. The band consisted of Jordan, Courtney Williams, Lem Johnson, Clarence Johnson, Charlie Drayton, and Walter Martin. In his first billing as the Elks Rendez-vous Band, his name was spelled "Louie" so people could avoid pronouncing it "Lewis".
File:Louis Jordan, New York, N.Y., ca. July 1946.jpg|thumb|upright|Jordan in New York, July 1946, shortly after getting second billing to Glen Gray's Casa Loma Orchestra at the Paramount.
In 1942, Jordan and his band moved to Los Angeles where he began making soundies, the precursors of music videos. He appeared on many Jubilee radio shows and a series of programs for the Armed Forces Radio that were distributed to American troops overseas. Jordan's career was uninterrupted by the draft except for a four-week Army camp tour. Because of a "hernia condition" he was classified "4F".
During the 1940s, Jordan and the band became popular with such hits as "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie", "Knock Me a Kiss", "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby", and "Five Guys Named Moe". He recorded with Ella Fitzgerald both during and after their time with Chick Webb, also Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong and appeared in films. Within a year of his breakthrough, the Tympany Five's appearance fee rose from $350 to $2,000 per night. But the breadth of Jordan's success and the size of his combo had larger implications for the music industry. The blues singer Gatemouth Moore said, "He was playing... with five pieces. That ruined the big bands... He could play just as good and just as loud with five as 17. And it was cheaper."
Jordan's raucous recordings were notable for using contemporary narratives. This is perhaps best exemplified on "Saturday Night Fish Fry", a two-part 1950 hit that was split across both sides of a 78-rpm record. It was one of the first popular songs to use the word "rocking" in the chorus and to feature a distorted electric guitar. Many sources describe this recording, and some others by Jordan, as "jump blues", because "it literally made its listeners jump to its pulsing beat", according to NPR. One source states that "Saturday Night Fish Fry" had a "lively jump rhythm, call-and-response chorus and double-string electric guitar riffs that Chuck Berry would later admit to copying".
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 as an "early influence". He is described by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as "The Father of Rhythm & Blues" and "The Grandfather of Rock 'n' Roll". The Hall also states that "Saturday Night Fish Fry" is "an early example of rap and possibly the first rock and roll recording". Not all critics agree with the importance of his work as a rock and roll influence. For example, Rolling Stone offers this take on Jordan's recordings from the late 1940s: "... the early idol of both Berry and Bill Haley, came closest, but his jump 'n' jive story songs were aimed as much at adults as teens, and any hillbilly flavor in his records was strictly a comedic device". The article agrees with Sam Phillips that rock and roll "specifically addressed and was tailored to teenagers".
Another source describes Jordan's jump blues style as combining "good-natured novelty lyrics ; the tempo; the beat and the sound with his bluesy saxophone and playful melodies."
During this period, Jordan crossed over on the popular music charts placing more than a dozen songs nationally though his greatest success was with the Tympany Five dominating the 1940s R&B charts, or the "race" charts. In this period, Jordan had eighteen Number 1 singles and fifty four in the Top Ten. According to Joel Whitburn's analysis of the Billboard magazine charts, Jordan ranks fifth among the most successful musicians of the period 1942–1995. From July 1946 through May 1947, Jordan had five consecutive number one songs, holding the top slot for 44 consecutive weeks.
Jordan's popularity was boosted not only by his hit Decca records but also by his prolific recordings for Armed Forces Radio and the V-Disc transcription program along with starring in short musical films and making "soundies" of his hit songs all of which helped make him popular with whites and blacks alike.
Jordan was certainly a significant figure in the development of rhythm and blues. According to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he and Big Joe Turner laid the foundation for R&B in the 1940s, "cutting one swinging rhythm & blues masterpiece after another". Stepping away from his rhythm and blues style, Jordan started a big band in the early 1950s that was unsuccessful. Throughout the 1950s, illness kept him near his home in Arizona.
On June 1, 1952, Jordan performed at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles for the eighth Cavalcade of Jazz concert which Leon Hefflin, Sr. produced. On June 20, 1954, he and his Tympany Five returned for the tenth Cavalcade of Jazz concert.
Jordan signed with Aladdin for which he recorded 21 songs in early 1954. They released nine singles from these sessions; three of the songs were not released. In 1955, he recorded with "X" Records, a subsidiary of RCA, which had changed its name to Vik Records while Jordan was with them. Three singles were by released by "X" and one by Vik; four tracks were not released. For these sessions, Jordan changed and simplified his sound, wanting to be part of the rock and roll wave. In 1956, Mercury signed Jordan and released two albums and a handful of singles. His first album for Mercury, Somebody Up There Digs Me, showcased updated rock-and-roll versions of previous hits such as "Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chickens", "Caldonia", "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie", "Salt Pork, West Virginia", and "Beware!" Mercury intended this to be a comeback for Jordan, but it was commercially unsuccessful, and the label let him go in 1958. Jordan later expressed disliking rock 'n' roll and commented "A lot of companies have asked me to record, but they insisted that I go into rock 'n' roll, and I didn't want to change my style". He recorded sporadically in the 1960s for Warwick, Black Lion, Tangerine, and Pzazz and in the early 1970s for Black & Blue, Blues Spectrum, and JSP.
In the early 1960s, he toured in England with Chris Barber. Speaking in 2012, Barber recalled seeing Jordan at the Apollo Theater in New York:
Jordan remade some of his top hits for a 1973 LP, I Believe in Music: "Caldonia", "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby", "Saturday Night Fish Fry" and "I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town". He also added new material.
According to a Billboard book cited by the Blues Hall of Fame, Jordan had "18 No. 1 hits on the race and R&B charts spent a total of 113 weeks in the top slot, almost twice as many weeks as any other artist in the history of rhythm & blues".
One publication of the Smithsonian Institution provided this summary of Jordan's music.
One important stylistic prototype in the development of R&B was jump blues, pioneered by Louis Jordan, with his group Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five. Jordan's group... consisted of three horns and a rhythm section, while stylistically his music melded elements of swing and blues, incorporating the shuffle rhythm, boogie-woogie bass lines, and short horn patterns or riffs. The songs featured the use of African American vernacular language, humor, and vocal call-and-response sections between Jordan and the band. Jordan's music appealed to both African American and white audiences, and he had broad success with hit songs like "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby".