Louis Jordan
(1908–1975)
Five Guys Named Moe
Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield, 1995
Before he made the blues jump, Louis Jordan served a long apprenticeship learning how to make jazz sit up and take notice of him.
His father was a bandleader and music teacher in Brinkley, Arkansas, where Louis was born on 8 July 1908. He started playing the clarinet at the age of seven at school in Little Rock, and soon took up the saxophone as well. In time he developed a distinctive, lively style on its alto, tenor and baritone forms, later attributing this to a “fascination” with T-Bone Walker.
His on-the-job training really took off in the late 1920s when he began working with such noted jazz practitioners as Jimmy Pryor and his band the Imperial Serenaders, and Ruby Williams’s Belvedere Orchestra in Hot Springs. By 1932 he had moved to Philadelphia and was gaining further valuable experience with tubaist Jim Winters’s band.
Jordan first visited New York in March 1934 with Charlie Gaines. There they both participated in a notable recording session with Clarence Williams. Among the numbers they performed on that occasion was ‘I Can’t Dance’. From that point on, with his sights set on the big time, Jordan continued to divide his time between New York and Philadelphia, joining Local 802 in the former and gigging with Gaines in the latter. After a brief period under Kaiser Marshall, the summer of 1935 found him touring Cleveland and Atlantic City with the Le Roy Smith Orchestra out of New York.
By August 1938 he was ready to set up as a bandleader in his own right. A two-year stint with Chick Webb’s Band playing soprano and alto sax and developing his own unique vocal style had given him the final boost he needed. The place he chose was Elk’s Rendezvous in New York, and the band came to be called the Tympany Five. They made their first recordings in December of that year.
At first their lack of success was disappointing, though hardly surprising. Bands both big and small were two-a-penny at the time – Jordan himself has already played for at least half a dozen – and, with the country in a state of stress due to the effects of the war, Jordan’s own flamboyant playing style and individualistic vocals were perhaps out of keeping with the mood of the people he was seeking to reach. It was not a time for eccentricity of any kind, least of all for a combo calling itself the Tympany Five whose playing complement could comprise between seven and nine players at any one time…
The turnaround in their fortunes came in 1944 with the release of ‘Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby’, which went on to sell over a million copies. This was followed up to two years later by ‘Choo Choo Ch’Boogie’, which sold over two million, and led to a series of hits which sold prodigiously for the rest of the decade. During this period Jodan’s career was further consolidated by appearances in films. Follow the Boys in 1944 and Shout Sister Shout (1949) both featured his unique and boisterous talents. Jordan’s original voice had finally found its public.
The quality of that voice has been described variously as “infectious”, “idiosyncratic”, “lively” or “sardonic”, depending on the mood of the song its owner happened to be tackling at the time. On ‘School Days’ he gives old nursery rhymes a vigorous shakedown, while the activities of the police in ‘Saturday Night Fish Fry’ leave him distinctly unimpressed. In ‘Beware’ he offers a confidential word of advice to all the males in his audience to be on their guard against the wiles of the opposite sex.
As for the term ‘jump music’, opinions vary as to how this particular phrase came about. Jordan’s high alto seems to leap out of every arrangement like a startled hare. On the other hand, Jordan himself claims the credit for coining the epithet when in an interview he described his progression from jazz to rhythm and blues. Having worked with the biggest names in the business – Armstrong, Fitzgerald, Crosby – he felt the need to change direction, while reserving the right to impose on the new discipline his own unique style. “I didn’t think I could handle a big band. But with my little band (ie, the Tympany Five) I did everything they did with a big band. I made the blues jump.”
Whatever the truth of it, the blues duly jumped, and Louis Jordan jumped right along with them – perhaps too high. Injuries interrupted his playing career in January 1947 and February 1948, and in the early 1950s he briefly led his own big band. But his earlier doubts as to whether this was the right format for him proved correct, and by the mid-1950s the Tympany Five (or seven, or nine, or however many there were this time around) re-formed to make new recordings of ‘The Slop’ and ‘Fish Fry’ among others.
In the early 1960s Jordan moved to Los Angeles, having been for a long time resident in Phoenix, Arizona, and now he embarked on a series of tours both solo and in company. In 1962 he came to Britain and played alongside Chris Barber, visited Asia in 1967 and 1968, and made his final recordings in 1974 after working with the Johnny Otis Show.
Louis Jordan’s had been a long, varied and fruitful career with several ups and downs, as perhaps befits a man who claimed to have brought a certain gymnastic quality to the form of music he had switched over to. Sonny Rollins had no hesitation in citing Jordan as one of his earliest influences, and his inspiration can also be detected in the work of Sam ‘The Man’ Taylor.
Louis Jordan died at his home in Los Angeles on 4 February 1975.
