"Yeah, man, he's too much."īut Tejeda also says Jordan is getting frail, and looks like he's in pain. "The patch, right, that just adds a whole 'nother mystique - his pirate, pachuco, barrio dude, hip cat," says Juan Tejeda, coordinator of San Antonio's Conjunto Festival. Jordan's music and his persona are inseparable. "So, from a musical standpoint, he's a genius." "He's playing flat-fifths and raised 11ths, rhythmically so deep," Guzman says. Then there's the whole jazz thing, says Joel Guzman, an acclaimed traditional accordionist from Austin, Texas. Those effects - like phase shifters, fuzzboxes and echoplexes - gave rise to the label that Jordan hates to this day: "the Jimi Hendrix of the accordion." He brought in the effects that had never been done on the accordion - to this day, nobody does it." "He used pedals, he brought in jazz influences to the accordion playing. "What Steve Jordan did was, he electrified the accordion," says Sunny Sauceda, a rising star on the squeezebox. He was even good enough to play guitar with Willie Bobo's Latin jazz band in 1964. Over a long, turbulent career drenched in booze and drugs, he played everything he heard, and learned every instrument he got his hands on. Nearly blinded at birth in both eyes by a clumsy midwife, he picked up the accordion for the first time at a migrant labor camp in Texas when he was 7. Jordan was a musical child prodigy who never went to school and, to this day, cannot read or write. Though his health is now failing, the 70-year-old is still performing - and set to embark on a new phase of his career. In the world of Mexican-American music, Jordan is a legend: He's done things on the button accordion that had never been done before, or in some cases since. Welcome to the world of Steve Jordan: where time and sound bend, and accordions can fly. "There hasn't been any other fascinating musician that can defy gravity, actually, and can bend time and bend sound." "I've been listening to Steve since probably 1980," says Joe Rodriguez, a fan.
MEXICO ACCORDION PATCH
One longtime follower has a picture of El Parche - Jordan's nickname, owing to the eye patch - tattooed on his bicep.
At 70, he's still the peacock: He wears a shiny gold shirt with puffy sleeves, a purple vest, purple bell-bottoms, black boots and his iconic black eye patch. On this night, all the bands at the annual Tejano Conjunto Festival are paying tribute to Steve Jordan.įrom the door of an RV steps the gaunt accordionist.
MEXICO ACCORDION FULL
It's a warm night under a full moon on the west side of San Antonio.