Stanley Jordan

Stanley Jordan is a jazz guitarist from Chicago, United States, born in 1959. He is known for a style that spans contemporary jazz, instrumental music, jazz fusion and smooth jazz, and for an approach to the guitar based on tapping the fretboard rather than using conventional strumming and picking.

Career

Jordan comes to prominence with his 1985 debut album Magic Touch. The record helps establish him as a distinctive new electric-guitar voice and is also part of Blue Note Records’ move into a more contemporary direction. His playing on the album draws attention for its warmth and melodic use of tapping, a technique he develops without formal study and has already been applying for about a decade by the time of the release.

Magic Touch reaches No. 1 on Billboard’s jazz chart for 51 weeks. Its smooth jazz radio support comes in part through his versions of Michael Jackson’s “The Lady in My Life” and the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”. The album also becomes a gold seller, with sales of over 500,000 copies.

Later albums and label work

Jordan’s early follow-up recordings show him working across styles while trying to move beyond the commercial expectations attached to his debut. Standards Volume 1 (1986) is a solo guitar album in which he argues that songs by Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell deserve status as standards alongside older jazz repertoire such as “Georgia On My Mind”.

He follows this with Flying Home (1988), a band album, and Cornucopia (1990), an album split between straight-ahead live jazz and studio-recorded original material. In 1994, after moving to Arista Records, he releases Bolero, a wide-ranging set that includes versions of Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Drifting”, as well as his own “Plato’s Blues”. The centrepiece is a 17-minute arrangement of Ravel’s Bolero, divided into rock, African, Latin, groove and industrial versions.

Collaborations and later work

After stepping back from the music business in the 1990s and spending time in the mountains of the southwest, Jordan returns with a focus on music as a form of service, inspiration and healing. He takes a strong interest in music therapy and studies it in a Masters programme at Arizona State University.

His later recordings include a feature with the Italian group Novocento on their 2004 album Dreams of Peace. He also records Ragas, a collaboration with musicians from India that includes Jay Kishor on sitar, and Relaxing Music in Difficult Situations I, which extends his music therapy interests into recorded form. He also develops an interest in sonification, using sound to represent information, and applies ideas from arranging and sound mixing to that work.

Approach and legacy

Jordan’s playing is closely associated with his tapping technique, which he uses in styles ranging from swing to rock. He is also known for separating artistic and commercial concerns, preferring musical satisfaction over fame. Across his career, he presents music not only as performance but also as a tool for learning, confidence-building, creativity and emotional understanding.