Celebrating Kidd Jordan and His Music
Hour One

        Tracks, Performances and Interviews
     with Hamid Drake, William Parker, Fred Anderson,      
Harrison Bankhead, Alvin Fielder, Joel Futterman,    
Marlon Jordan, Alex de Grassi,
Kirk Joseph, Roger Lewis, Cyril Neville,  
Don Paul, and More

0:00 Excerpt from “11:55”, Track 2 from a Concert with Kidd Jordan, Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake and William Parker at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, April 1, 1999, as presented on the double-CD album from Eremite Records, Two Days In April.

0:12 Introduction to ‘Celebrating Kidd Jordan and His Music’

0:18 Interview with Kidd in September 2015 for the first ’Spiritual: New Orleans’ Music and the World’ show on Let’s Live Radio. Don asks Kidd to speak about moments when it feels like music is simply flowing through him.

0:41 Kidd speaks about that “feeling that look like something just hit you … when you have no thoughts at all, when you’re listening and playing, I’m always just listening.”

0:54 Earlier excerpt from “11:55” as played in the Concert at U-Mass Amherst with William, Hamid, Fred and Kidd.

1:07 Introduction of Kidd and “friends Hamid Drake, William Parker, Fred Anderson, Harrison Bankhead, Alvin Fielder, Joel Futterman, Marlon Jordan, Morikeba Kouyate, Alex de Grassi, Roger Lewis, Kirk Joseph, Cyril Neville, Don Paul, and more. ”We have here GREAT MUSIC in several contexts.”

1:28 A earlier, fuller excerpt from “11:55”


Photo by Michael Wilderman.

1:58 Celebrating the “pure improvisation” that makes up Two Days In April and its beauty and brilliance as “modern Classical music.”

2:25 “Kidd’s voice was above all else adaptable.” Intro to “Semaya In The Blues”—Kidd and Hamid Drake and Alex de Grassi improvising for the soundtrack to Melissa Gregory Rue’s documentary, “Live Out Loud”, about three artists-in-progress, each transitioning from homelessness, each making his or her first movie, in Portland Oregon. Recorded June 5, 2018 at Rick G. Nelson’s Marigny Studio in New Orleans.

3:00 Excerpt from “Semaya In The Blues”, June 5, 2018.
3:29 “Once Kidd reached his most capacious expression on the saxophone, that ... “altissimo” extolled by T.R. Johnson and Nate Chinen, he was off, up and away.”
4:05 Excerpt from “Live Out Loud”, The GALLOP Quartet, June 2018.


Photo by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee.

4:23 “Kidd, like a racehorse. Kidd, like a scourge, … Kidd, bending like both bow and arrow with empathy and thus singing as close he could toward Heaven.”

4:52 Excerpt from “Forever”, Kidd Jordan, Hamid Drake, William Parker, Palm Of Soul, September 2005.


5:42 “Kidd was also a teacher for more than 60 years….”

7:00 Excerpt from “The River Niger Visits an Electric Slide Show in Portland, Oregon”, Kidd Jordan, Hamid Drake, Alex de Grassi, and Don Paul, June 5, 2018.

9:26 Kidd’s upbringing in Crowley, Louisiana and his focus in college (at age 16) on “20th-century music” (Bartok, Berg, Schoenberg). His listening to Roy Brown, and T-Bone Walker and “some very good players” among touring Blues bands. His shared experiences in 1950s Louisiana with Ornette Coleman.… All told by Kidd to Don in his September 2015 interview for the first hour of a series on Let’s Live Radio—the series then called ’Spiritual: New Orleans Music and the World” … before it grew during 2017 into the Hours now titled ’Spiritual as Music’,

12:56 Kidd’s featured solo in the William Parker Orchestra performance of Billy Strayhorn’s and Duke Ellington’s “Take The A Train”, Milano, Italy, 2012.

19:50 On Essence of Ellington by the William Parker Orchestra.


20:10 Kidd finds Fred Anderson in Chicago during the 1980s and they become, Hamid Drake says, perfect complements to each other. Soon, the 1990s, Fred, Hamid, Kidd and William were combining in albums that were immediately classic. Fred, like Kidd, taught countless younger musicians—Harrison Bankhead, Dougles Hewitt, George. Harrison passed away at age 68 on April 8th, one day after his companion in music and art, Kidd.

21:15 Honoring these creators, let’s listen to the opening minutes of “By Many Names” from the 2005 album Timeless on Chicago’s Delmark label, with Fred, Hamid and Harrison live in the Velvet Lounge of Chicago’s Near South Side.



26:06 Two Days In April, 1999, the double-CD album from Eremite Records of Concerts at U-Mass, Amherst, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, presents Fred and Kidd, William and Hamid, in “pure improvisation” and in Halls respectful of these musicians’ eminence. We hear the second excerpt from the first Day, April 1, 1999, its title its length. “11:55”.
“Great quartet. Great duets. Modern classical music.”

34:27 Kidd talks about Fred with Joseph Chonto in Chicago, 2009. Fred, he says, is “a friend of mine … like Alvin Fielder, the drummer, is a friend of mine, … like a brother to me.” Playing with Fred, Kidd says, he “just tries to get out of the way … to weave around what’s happening.”

36:17 “Spirits Came In”, William, Hamid, Fred and Kidd, Vision Festival #9, 2005.


40:05 Jumping again, 10 years forward, to the interview of 2015 with Kidd on the first “Spiritual: New Orleans’ Music and the World” show for Let’s Live Radio. Kidd’s students Roger Lewis and Kirk Joseph of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band were the other interview subjects on this show. Kidd had helped the Dirty Dozen travel to Europe for the first time, 1982, to a venue in Groningen, the Netherlands.

2015 was the 10th anniversary of the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina due to Levees, Gates, Walls, and other infrastructures’ failures. I asked Kidd about his family’s experience then. They evacuated as far north as Baton Rouge.


Snapshot by Don Paul.

40:25 Kidd on seeing through TV that the city was “like a Lake” and that “we really in some trouble now.”

41:22 Kirk Joseph and Roger Lewis and their help from Kidd. Kirk and Roger talk in September 2015 about their Dirty Dozen Brass Band album What’s Going On? with guest Chuck D. They talk about “what’s still going on.”

42:55 Dirty Dozen Brass Band with Chuck D, What’s Going On?, opening minutes.


45:35 Cyril Neville and a band of all-star New Orleans’ musicians and singers—Russell Batiste, Henry Butler, Ivan Neville, Leo Nocentelli, George Porter, …—who were exiled by the flooding of their home city, live at a Club in Austin, Texas. 2006, with their expression of Curtis Mayfield’s “This Is My Country.”

46:24 Cyril Neville and Russell Batiste, Henry Butler, Ivan Neville, Leo Nocentelli, George Porter, … in Curtis Mayfield’s “This Is My Country.”


Cyril Neville and Patricia Nicholson Parker among the 16 Appreciations of Kidd registered for the ‘Honoring the Kidd” Concert of November 1, 2019 at the New Orleans Jazz Museum.

51:51 September of 2005, Kidd Jordan hears from William Parker and Hamid Drake about recording an album. The three gather in Brooklyn for the improvisations that become Palm Of Soul, an album that somehow leaves Kidd feeling “bad.”. Don wonders why, saying that he thinks it’s “one of the most affecting albums of the 21st-century.”

53:24 Excerpt from “Living Peace”, Palm Of Soul by Kidd Jordan, William Parker and Hamid Drake, on AUM Fidelity, recorded Sept. 23, 2005.

58:37 Outro concludes Hour One.