The XRIJF program says that Stanley Jordan will be playing solo, but it might be argued that there will be a duo on the Harro East stage. Jordan is known for using his "touch technique" to play two guitars at once. And on his latest album, "State Of Nature," he plays guitar and piano simultaneously. Jordan is not unlike an Olympic athlete, pushing the capacity of a human being.

"I think we all get inspired watching somebody push to the limit and try to find that next level, but that's not my main purpose," said Jordan by phone from his Sedona, Arizona home. "There are things I want to do that I can't do with just one instrument. When I'm playing two guitars or guitar and piano I think of it as one instrument with a bigger palette of tonal colors."

Jordan developed his guitar style when he was 17, after six years of playing conventionally. "I started out as a pianist. I wanted to do pianistic things, so I started to think, How can I develop some of these musical ideas on the guitar? I've always loved counterpoint and I love the rich harmonies that a pianist can play, so I experimented to try to figure out a way to do that on guitar."

Jordan's technique involves hammering the strings of a low-action electric guitar against the fretboard with the fingers. Because there's no plucking or strumming, two hands can play independently. While his right hand plays lead, his left hand is free to play rhythm and bass. Jordan says Jimmy Webster was the first guitarist to use the touch technique in the 1950's.

Jordan put his own spin on it in the early 1980's, playing on the streets of New York City. He'd been trying to get his foot in the door of the music business to no avail. "I met some street musicians and they said, ‘Man, you should just come out and play with us.' It suddenly hit me that I was waiting for the middleman to give me permission to play my music for the people, when the people are right here, right now. Why don't I just go to the people and play? So the street music thing was very empowering for me. It wasn't a hard-luck story."

Still, it wasn't easy being an electric street guitarist in the early 1980's. "I never got arrested, but part of the challenge was you had to look out for the cops, because sometimes they were a little bit difficult. The big issue was if you drew a big crowd the police would come and break it up," he says.

Then there was the challenge of finding a good battery-powered amplifier. "You only had the Pignose, which didn't get that loud and was mostly distorted. One breakthrough was the Mouse amp. When the Mouse came out, you could play a battery-powered amp in the street.

Sound quality was important, because Jordan was depending on those bills in the guitar case for his income. "I used to get great crowds in Washington Square Park, but nobody had any money," he says. "I also played on Wall Street, but I never made any money. I guess part of the reason people have so much money there is because they save it. One of my favorite places was 48th Street, where the music stores are. I met a lot of music industry people there."

Hot shots finally took notice and Jordan was abruptly on his way. "My first major concert in New York was when they put me in last-minute in the Cool Jazz Festival in 1984. Two days before that I was playing on the street," he says.

Part of Jordan's appeal was that he was not a jazz purist. One of his most stunning performances on YouTube is "Stairway To Heaven." "I used to play ‘Stairway To Heaven' when it was on the radio back in the day," Jordan says. "Over time I started to get into jazz. I knew that I wanted jazz to be my core music, but most of the jazz musicians I liked played standards, and they played the standards of their time. Art Tatum would play a song like ‘I Can't Get Started.'

"It didn't occur to me that you weren't supposed to play the newer standards, you were just supposed to play the old ones," he says. "When I first signed with Blue Note [in 1984], [label president] Bruce Lundvall said, ‘One of the things I like about you is you play more recent songs and you play them like standards, and that's kind of unique.'

"Nowadays that's not such a big deal, but back then it was kind of new," he says. "On some of the older songs, I couldn't understand the context. With the newer songs, I have more of an emotional connection, so I bring something to it that's more compelling."

On Jordan's excellent "State Of Nature" CD, he continues to add pop songs to the standard repertoire with an irresistible version of "Steppin' Out," the 1982 Joe Jackson hit. At first it might seem an odd choice for an album dealing with the relationship of humans to the natural world. But, as Jordan writes in his liner notes: "Uptown, downtown, everywhere the action's at/We ride the wave for all it's worth/Until there's nothing left to do but to return/To our cozy spot at the edge of town/Sounds of today's first birds welcome us home/Reminding us that Nature still rules."

If Jordan's liner notes are unusually poetic and philosophical, it may be because he attended Princeton University. "I had the opportunity to pick which kind of school to attend. The obvious choice was a music conservatory, but I decided to go to a liberal arts college because I wanted to approach music in a broader sense," he says. "I thought I should learn something about the world in general and not just be a specialist in music."

Stanley Jordan

Monday, June 14

Harro East Ballroom, 155 N Chestnut St.

5:30 p.m. & 7:15 p.m. | $20 or Club Pass