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The Struggle to Stay Relevant in the Fifties 10:11 Jackson: It’s actually kind of heartbreaking to see how quickly the industry turned on him once the fifties really got moving. He was the king of Decca Records for years, but then in late 1953, they just dropped him. And the person who replaced him on the roster? Bill Haley.
10:27 Miles: Talk about a "sign of the times." Bill Haley was the sound of the future—white, guitar-driven, and aimed directly at the emerging teenage market. Jordan’s jump blues, which had been the height of cool, was suddenly being viewed as the sound of "formal ballroom dances." And the irony is that those ballroom dances were being disrupted by the very rock and roll moves that Jordan’s music had helped inspire!
10:51 Jackson: So his bookings started drying up, he’s off his major label, and he’s watching these younger guys like Elvis Presley and Little Richard take over the world using his blueprint. How did he react to that?
11:02 Miles: Honestly? Not great. There’s a bit of a tragic element here. Jordan was an old-school jazz purist at heart. He actually loathed musical improvisation. There’s this famous story from 1956—he was performing "Caldonia" on *The Steve Allen Show*, and a couple of audience members got up and started jitterbugging. Jordan actually tried to get a police officer to intervene! He was very "proper" about his performance style, even though the music was raucous.
11:28 Jackson: That’s so ironic! He’s the "Grandfather of Rock 'n' Roll," but he’s calling the cops on the kids for dancing to his music?
11:35 Miles: It gets even more complicated. He was quite dismissive of rock and roll as a genre. In 1960, he predicted that the music only had about one year left! He said, "The music is bad if the words are good. We started it, but it’s been changed." He felt that the "honking" tenor sax style that the kids wanted was beneath him. He was an alto player, a sophisticated musician, and he felt he was "too old" to just start honking for the sake of a big beat.
12:04 Jackson: It sounds like a classic case of an artist getting trapped by their own standards. He helped create the revolution, but he couldn't—or wouldn't—join it once it moved past him.
3:08 Miles: Exactly. He did try to "rock out" a bit when he signed with RCA’s X label. He put out a track called "Rock ’n’ Roll Call" in 1955, where he’s literally shouting "Let’s rock ’n’ roll and have a ball!" but it felt a bit forced. He was sharing a label with Elvis by then, and the world was just looking elsewhere. His recordings for Aladdin during that period were being ignored by DJs. He was still a household name, but he wasn't "the guy" anymore.
12:41 Jackson: It’s a tough spot to be in—being told you’re the "original," but people are only interested in the "new." But he did have one last burst of brilliance, didn't he? That Mercury album produced by Quincy Jones?
12:54 Miles: Yes, *Somebody Up There Digs Me*, recorded in October 1956. That’s almost seventy years ago now! Quincy Jones was a huge fan—Jordan was his childhood hero—and he wanted to give him a hit. They reimagined all his old Decca classics like "Choo Choo Ch’Boogie" and "Caldonia" using modern recording techniques and a really aggressive, rockin’ style. They put Mickey Baker’s zinging guitar right at the front of the mix.
13:21 Jackson: And did it work?
13:22 Miles: Musically, it was incredible. It sounds reinvigorated, loose, and feral. But commercially? It disappeared without a trace. The teenagers of 1956 were too busy with the future to look back at a legend from the forties. It’s a shame, because it’s arguably some of his best work, but it was just "too little, too late" for the charts.