Louis Jordan: Swing Era

And His Tympany Band Films and Soundies

One of the chief progenitors of the R&B idiom and a pioneer of the small-combo "jump" blues style so popular during the Forties, vocalist and altoman Louis Jordan (1908-1975) is justly remembered as a performer who defined an era. An effervescent saxophonist and an enthusiastic singer with a very personal, jive-loaded sense of humor, the irrepressible Jordan enjoyed a sensational string of hits while fronting his rock-solid Tympany Five band from the war years onwards to the early Fifties. The scale of his massive popularity during this period was truly astonishing: besides decisively influencing Ray Charles and countless other young R & B artists, from 1942 to 1951 he scored no less than 57 R&B chart hits on the Decca record label, including such timeless gems as "Five Guys Named Moe", "Caldonia", "Choo Choo Ch' Boogie", "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" or "Saturday Night Fish Fry".

Gathering material from Jordan's feature films Beware (1946), Reet, Petite And Gone (1947) and Look Out Sister (1948), plus a selection of different "soundies" mainly shot for the black cinemas of America, this video offers a fascinating portrait of this true visionary of music, whose songs sound as irresistible today as they did over five decades ago. The legend lives on!