Stanley Jordan: The Guitar Genius with the Magic Touch Plays Jimi

By Kaju Roberto

I’d place Stanley Jordan right up there in innovation on the guitar beside Jimi Hendrix and Edward Van Halen all day long. In my humble opinion, he doesn’t get the credit he truly deserves. With a plethora of bedroom Instagram guitarists out there all trying to one up each other in acrobatics, the word “genius” is used far too loosely today.

However with Stanley, this term is absolutely truly accurate. He is indubitably the real deal. He has always been the real deal guitar genius ever since I started following him in the early ‘80s when he was busking in New York City before the term even became fashionable.

Go to YouTube and check out his live renditions of Eleanor Rigby and Stairway to Heaven, and you will know why.

Legendary Playing Style and World Record
Back in the early ‘80s, Stanley established a two-handed tapping technique with multiple chord voicings using multiple fingers simultaneously that was far ahead of its time, expanding on the instruments’ vocabularies, and capabilities where Van Halen and others left off.

In 1985, his first album, Magic Touch, debuted on a revamped Blue Note Records and remained on the Billboard Jazz chart for 51 consecutive weeks—a record that still stands. Today after years of performing solo shows—and with a variety of the music elite—he has created a must-see live tour. It is an intriguing project called Stanley Jordan Plays Jimi, where he has envisioned what Jimi Hendrix would sound like if he were still living and touring today

Stanley performs Jimi’s full catalog with his incredible trio of Kenwood Dennard on drums and West Wirth on electric bass. I can’t think of a more worthy player and trio more equipped and qualified to honor the great Jimi Hendrix’s vision.

Interview Excerpts
As a fan of all the great virtuoso guitarists and a guitarist myself, I was truly humbled to interview the great Stanley Jordan recently at Washington Square Diner in Greenwich Village. Here are a few excerpts.

Welcome to the one and only Stanley Jordan. What do Yngwie Malmsteen and Stanley Jordan have in common?
Um, we both know the harmonic minor scale? (laughter)

That’s a good second guess. I would say you certainly do know neoclassical. But, the real answer is that you both first picked up the guitar on the day that Jimi Hendrix died. September 18, 1970.
Wow. Well, in my case, it’s close. When I got the news that he died, that’s when I made up my mind for sure that I was going to play a guitar.

Because my whole life as a guitar player in a sense is a kind of a footnote to Jimi, and when you look at how I started, I wanted to basically continue his legacy. But the most important thing that I got from Jimi is that the guitar is a personal instrument and you can find your own voice.

That’s amazing. I take it that your parents really supported your creative sparks?
They did. And I feel really blessed about that. You know, especially thinking back on where we were positioned in the society. We were an upwardly mobile Black family living in the suburbs in the area that is now called Silicon Valley.

A lot of people were moving there because they were part of the high tech boom. They had dreams of success in their careers. And certainly we had lived on the East Coast. We moved there because my father got a job. He was actually the first personnel manager at Hewlett Packard, and he hired Roy Clay, who we just lost last year.

Does it take both the right side and the left side of your brain to come up with a new way of playing the guitar?
That’s a good point. Because it was very scientific in how I went about it, and I knew what I was trying to accomplish. I tried a bunch of different things, tried this and that and I worked it out. 

I wanted to touch upon how you approach reworking classics like Eleanor Rigby.
Wow. What a great question. Going back to Keith Jarrett, his solo piano improvisations, where he just sits at the piano totally open with no idea what he’s going to do, he just lets the music flow through him.

The other extreme is I’m a sheet music originalist. There’s some people who say that you don’t have any rights that aren’t explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. I’m always somewhere in-between on that continuum. 

I was fascinated by your Jimi show.  Explain your thought process for how you envisioned Hendrix’s sound and musical choices would’ve changed if he were performing today?
Well, the main thing is that late in life he was moving into jazz and jazz influenced things and kind of fusion influenced things. He also was doing a lot of Middle Eastern scales with the augmented seconds and stuff. He was also a fan of Dick Dale, the surf guitar guy. And Dick Dale, turns out, is from Lebanon.

I really enjoyed listening to your fascinating stories Stanley, you’re such an intellect. 

www.stanleyjordan.com/en/ 

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Kaju Roberto is an accomplished musician, singer/ songwriter, journalist, and an award-winning producer. He is the artist Rad Jet on Spotify.