This week in Texas music history: Steve Jordan is born

On Feb. 23, 1939, conjunto accordionist Esteban Jordan, aka Steve Jordan, was born in Elsa in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

He grew up in a large family of migrant farm workers and formed a band with his brothers after seeing Valerio Longoria play. Jordan was hooked. Conjunto would be his life, steeped in its tradition while also taking the accordion in unheard-of directions, far from its South Texas roots.

First, he did so literally, moving to San Jose, Calif., in 1958 and then settling in Phoenix for much of the sixties. That decade also stoked Jordan’s genre-crossing experiments with jazz and rock. He earned the nickname “Jimi Hendrix of the accordion” not just for these stylistic flights of fancy, but for the psychedelic phase shifters he brought to the instrument.

The wild sounds that squeezebox now made, paired with Jordan’s trademark snakeskin eye patch (source of his other nickname, “El Parche”) made for a striking persona. If Flaco Jiménez was conjunto’s crossover ambassador, Steve Jordan was its avant-garde pied piper.

He returned to the Lone Star State in the 1970s and spent much of his later career in the conjunto capital San Antonio, holding down a regular gig at a local bar even as he collaborated with big stars outside the genre — Jerry Garcia, Carlos Santana, Doug Sahm. He featured in David Byrne’s filmed ode to Texas, “True Stories,” and Cheech Marin’s “Born in East LA.”

Over the course of a dramatic career, Jordan released more than two dozen captivating albums, from tried-and-true cantina standards through wild postmodern experiments on perhaps that most Texan of instruments, the German, Mexican, Czech, Cajun, and Creole accordion.

Sources

Michael Corcoran, “The Invisible Genius: Steve Jordan,” Journal of Texas Music History, Spring 2003.

Edgar I. Morales in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.

Manuel Peña. Música Tejana: The Cultural Economy of Artistic Transformation. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1999.

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