Stanley Jordan - State of Nature

Mack Avenue

Stanley Jordan’s career has covered a curiously incongruous course. A meteoric ascendancy in the Eighties via a series of strong-selling albums on Blue Note put him in a position rivaling Pat Metheny. That status as guitar wunderkind hinged mainly on his method of playing multiple melodic and chordal parts simultaneously, a system modestly called “tapping”. The arrival of the Nineties saw his celebrity wane somewhat and then he inexplicably pulled a Tal Farlow, dropping off the scene for the much of the next decade. The whys and wherefores of that decision are still largely a mystery, but it appears that parts of the hiatus included time spent teaching, owning and managing a bookstore in Sedona, Arizona, and attending the ASU Master’s in Music Therapy program.

Mack Avenue is banking on a full blown resurgence with this record and it seems like a good bet assuming they hit the right markets. Jordan’s prodigious chops are intact and the nearly 80-minute program provides ample opportunity for him to show them off. Bassist Charnett Moffett (christened “charismatic” in the press copy, who am I to argue?) and drummers David Haynes and Kenwood Dennard, all seasoned veterans of the sort of fusion-leaning fare that Jordan favors, supply able sidemen support, but the spotlight is almost always on Jordan’s frets. The opening “A Place in Space” leaves no doubt as to Jordan’s plectral credentials and he sounds like an über-Wes Montgomery, voicing octaves and tightly braided note patterns with a velocity and precision that is almost machine-like. The program is wantonly eclectic encompassing an expected contingent of jazz tunes along with variable stabs at world music, pop classical and bread and butter fusion.

“All Blues” is the first of several tracks that finds him doubling on piano, and purportedly playing it concurrently with guitar and coming at the familiar modal progression from several angles. Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father” receives a similar-minded treatment with more dazzling fret play. Three interstitial pieces in the set’s second half, numbered “Mind Games”, feel more like filler. “Forest Garden”, “Adante from Mozart’s Piano Concerto” and “Healing Waves” make use of gilded guitar chords, soothing piano and arco strings, often to unfortunate treacly effect. “Insensatez” and “Ocean Breeze” explore Brazilian and Indian ethnicities, respectively. Jordan saves the real fusion popcorn fare for the final third and while the kernels fail to pop with my sensibilities the slowed down Satriani-style wailing that suffuses “Shadow Dance” is still strangely sort of endearing. He even revisits Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out”, second cousin to the equally then-ubiquitous “Axel F”. In sum, it’s a blend of stellar playing and often sub par material, a stumbling point not coincidentally indicative of his past work as well.

~ Derek Taylor