Jordan GCZ – December 7th, 2023
Though I can’t pinpoint the year, this song resulted from a saga that began in the late 1960s, New York City. I first met Jordan loitering outside Columbia’s studio in midtown, both hoping to get picked up for studio sessions by Miles Davis as his first true fusion sessions were coming together. I did not have the chops, but as always, it’s good to be around magical people when legendary things happen. Jordan, on the other hand, took his craft very seriously, and relentlessly studied at the keyboard. Although neither of us got Miles’s attention, Jordan did stir something in Joe Zawinul, who eventually asked him to sit in on the occasional West Village gig he couldn’t make because of Miles’s rigorous studio schedule.
By the following year, I had given up and resorted to scratching together a living doing odd jobs for Upper East Side socialites and busking with a melodica. Jordan met Terry Riley while sweeping floors during his recording sessions with John Cale for Church of Anthrax, oddly recorded in the same studios as Bitches Brew. Riley and Jordan hit it off immediately, and Riley saw the unbelievable talent present in Jordan from the beginning. Jordan usually sided with Riley in his frequent fights with Cale, and Riley took him under his wing as an apprentice.
This is when we lost touch. As I went on to a spotty career in raw juicer sales, Jordan disappeared to study under a line of eastern music gurus introduced to him by Riley. It wasn’t until the 1990s that he emerged in Amsterdam as part of the powerhouse duo we all know and love, Juju & Jordash. Although I had largely distanced myself from serious music, the spark to create struck me again around the same time I heard their first records. For Source Foray, with a few decades of electronic music under my belt, I thought I would try to reunite with my old friend for this compilation.
I asked Jordan to channel the wistful time around when we first met, and he put together the energy of Zawinul’s off kilter keyboards, Riley’s droning pipe organ techniques, and a smattering of analog synth low end. The result exceeded all expectations, mixing old and new in a way that only could have resulted from such a storied past. I hope his song, anachronistically titled “December 7, 2023”, provides you a fraction of the joy and reminiscence it did for me.
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