Duke Jordan, the superb bebop piano player best-known as the pianist for Charlie Parker's classic 1947 quintet with Miles Davis and Max Roach, and as the writer and namesake of the jazz standard "Jor-Du," died on August 8 at his home in Copenhagen. He was 84.

Jordan was one of the last two surviving members, along with Max Roach, of the quintet known variously as the Charlie Parker Quintet, Charlie Parker's All-Stars, and the Charlie Parker Original 5. Although the band was only together for a year (1947-48), it is widely regarded as among the greatest in the history of jazz and American music in general.

Irving Sidney Jordan was born April 1, 1922 in New York City, and initially studied classical music — until he heard the work of Teddy Wilson, his first hero, and devoted himself to jazz. Jordan was also a devotee of Duke Ellington, after whom he named himself, and especially Bud Powell.

Famous though he was for being in Bird's group, Jordan had a much broader and richer career than his one year in the spotlight. His career began in 1945, at the age of 23, when he played in Al Cooper's Savoy Sultans and Coleman Hawkins Orchestra and made his recording debut with the Floyd "Horsecollar" Williams Quartet. He then spent a year in the Roy Eldridge Orchestra (with future associate Cecil Payne), during which he began adapting Powell's innovations to his own melodic, swinging style. Parker first heard him with Eldridge that year, and hired him to join his own band the following summer.

Miles Davis famously disliked Jordan's playing — ostensibly because, as he explains in his autobiography Miles, Jordan would attempt to follow Bird even on the great altoists' most junked-out, lost, and incoherent solos, thereby making a shambles of the rhythm section. While there may be some truth to that, Miles is also notorious for its exaggerated potshots at other musicians; besides that, Parker, for all his disasters in human relations, was a masterful judge of musical talent, and he clearly saw greatness in Duke's playing.

Jordan, for his part, obliged Bird's faith in him with some of the most memorable piano of the era, including his brilliantly modern solo on "Klaunstance;" the immediately distinctive introduction to "Scrapple from the Apple;" and, of course, the sublime four-bar intro to Parker's "Embraceable You," a snippet of music so perfect it almost seems a fairy tale.

When Parker reorganized his band in late 1948, Jordan left for a spell in the Stan Getz Octet, another with Teddy Williams, and then spent a pair of residencies in the Sonny Stitt/Gene Ammons band and again with Stan Getz through the early '50s. Getz was said to shake his head and laugh when he heard Jordan's concise but endlessly melodic solos; he could play a dozen choruses, he once remarked, and not come up with a melody as good as the ones Jordan would play in eight bars.