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The ‘tender and heroic’ sounds of Edward ‘Kidd’ Jordan [1]

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Date: 2024-05-03  

Improvisation. That was the essence of Sir Edward “Kidd” Jordan.

“I don’t have the slightest idea from day to day what I’m going to play,” the saxophonist, clarinetist and music educator said during a 2015 interview. “Sometimes I surprise myself.”

Jordan played the tenor, baritone, soprano, alto, C-melody and sopranino saxophones, as well as contrabass and bass clarinets. Music critic Larry Blumenfeld said Jordan’s musicianship reached “into the altissimo range of his tenor saxophone to produce tones of squealing beauty. His playing was by turns tender and heroic, tuneful yet unbound. No one else sounded even remotely like him.”

For 34 years Jordan taught at Southern University at New Orleans, retiring in 2006 as the jazz studies program chair. He was the artistic director of the Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp and founded the Kidd Jordan Institute of Jazz and Modern Music.

Edward “Kidd” Jordan plays at the 2013 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Credit: Doug Anderson via Wikimedia Commons

“Teaching was my main thing,” Jordan told musician, educator and jazz historianMonk Rowe during a 2006 interview. “I never made a living as a professional musician. My whole thing was teaching and all the gigs were on the side.”

Jordan’s students included Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Jon Batiste, Donald Harrison Jr. and Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews. Four of Jordan’s seven children are professional musicians: Kent (flute), Stephanie (singer), Rachel (violin) and Marlon (trumpet).

Born May 5, 1935 in Crowley, La., Jordan moved to New Orleans in 1955. He received a bachelor’s degree from Southern University in Baton Rouge and a master’s in music from Millikin University in Illinois. The French government knighted him in 1985.

Jordan died in April 2023. This Sunday (May 5), the last day of the 2024 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, would have been Jordan’s 89 birthday.

“We’ve got a pretty good crowd,” Jordan said one year at Jazz Fest. “For those of you who aren’t used to this music, I live by improvisation.”

For more tales of New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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