A Guy Named Louis : The musical ‘Five Guys Named Moe’ has brought renewed appreciation of the pioneering Louis Jordan, a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who just may be the father of R&B;, rock <i> and</i> rap

Pay attention, this is a quiz: Who holds the all-time record for Top 10 rhythm and blues hits (55) and R&B; No. 1s (18)? James Brown? Ray Charles? Fats Domino? Aretha Franklin? Michael Jackson? No way. The envelope, please . . . and the winner is . . . Louis Jordan?

Yes, Louis Jordan. You may not know his music, but you probably know the work of some of his fans--Chuck Berry, B. B. King, Ray Charles, Fats Domino and Little Richard have all recorded versions of Jordan’s hits from the 1940s and identified him as an important influence on their musical development. Nat King Cole praised Jordan for being “so ahead of his time.”

Jazz great Dizzy Gillespie put Jordan on the short list of his favorite male vocalists, along with Cole, Louis Armstrong and Billy Eckstine. In his autobiography, “To Be or Not to Bop,” Gillespie wrote: “Rock ‘n’ roll was a form of music older than modern jazz and had been with us for a long time. Louis Jordan had been playing it as long as I could remember, long before Elvis Presley.”

The producer of Jordan’s hits, Milt Gabler, has acknowledged consciously “updating” the Jordan sound as producer of Bill Haley & the Comets’ original rock ‘n’ roll hits, including “Rock Around the Clock” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”

“We’d begin with Jordan’s shuffle rhythm and we’d build on it,” Gabler has been quoted as saying. “I’d sing Jordan’s riffs to the band; that would be picked up by the electric guitars and tenor sax.”

The Haley records were the first rock ‘n’ roll hits to cash in on the style developed by Louis Jordan--they would not be the last. In recent years, his material has been recorded by artists as diverse as British new-waver Joe Jackson, blues guitarists Albert Collins and B. B. King and country swing band Asleep at the Wheel.

And since October, 1990, when the musical “Five Guys Named Moe” opened at London’s Theatre Royal, Stratford East, contemporary audiences have been rediscovering Jordan’s irresistible “jump blues” for themselves. The show--which is loosely based on Jordan’s life and features performances of many of his hits, including the title song--has continued its hugely successful London run and was a hit on Broadway, all under the auspices of producer Cameron Mackintosh, whose earlier blockbusters included “Cats” and “The Phantom of the Opera.” “Moe” will have its West Coast premiere Thursday at the UCLA James A. Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood.

New compact disc reissues of Jordan’s original recordings have followed the musical’s original Broadway cast album into stores. For the first time since the early 1950s, Jordan is a genuine pop phenomenon; it’s too bad he isn’t around to smell the roses.

Like Bill Clinton, another saxophone player who hit the big time, Louis Jordan was born in Arkansas, in the town of Brinkley, on July 8, 1908. His father, Jim Jordan, was a music teacher who gave Louis a solid grounding in musical theory and the rudiments of a number of instruments. After concentrating initially on the clarinet, Louis became enamored of the saxophone as a teen-ager, and before long he was performing with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and other traveling shows. When he was 15, he left home to join the Ruby Williams band in Hot Springs, Ark., before moving to Little Rock and a job with Jimmy Pryor’s Stompers the following year.

From there, Jordan worked his way up the ranks, graduating from regional bands to recording groups in New York and Philadelphia. In 1932, he backed Louis Armstrong on a Victor recording date with Charlie Gaines’ band. By 1936 he was a saxophonist and featured vocalist with the popular Chick Webb orchestra, stars of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, where he often teamed up with Webb’s female vocalist, Ella Fitzgerald.

Jordan was at the apex of his profession; the only thing left was to start his own band. In 1938 he put together Louis Jordan’s Elks Rendez-Vous Band, named for the Harlem nightspot that served as their home base. Already an experienced showman, he realized that the band’s name was a mouthful and soon changed it to the Tympany Five.

The style and sensibility that would make Louis Jordan a household name in black, and white, America developed gradually over the next few years. His first Decca recordings, made in December, 1938, were in the swing idiom that was popular at that time. By 1941, when “Knock Me a Kiss” inaugurated his unprecedented run of R&B; and pop hits, he was concentrating on clever, often-humorous pop tunes, which he delivered in a light, almost conversational manner, with frequent spoken interjections and asides. (Jordan has been called the godfather of rap.)

The Tympany Five (which usually included more than five musicians but held onto its popular “brand name”) made music that was increasingly rhythmic and streamlined, with punchy, blues-based riffing replacing the mellower, more jazzy arrangements heard on his earlier sides. As the songs grew progressively bluesier, often zeroing in on the lifestyles and popular culture of black Americans, the rhythms got harder.

In 1945 Jordan appropriated the then-novel boogie-woogie rhythm for “Caldonia,” a gritty, rocking shuffle that has since become a blues standard. The combination of incisive novelty lyrics, catchy refrains using current slang and the driving boogie-shuffles his rhythm section perfected brought him hit after hit.

Songs like “Beware,” “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying,” “Let the Good Times Roll” and the million-seller “Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie” endeared him to black dancers and record buyers.

In 1944 his records began “crossing over” from rhythm and blues to the pop charts, a phenomenon that was not seen again until mid-’50s crossover artists like Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino helped launch the rock revolution. Before the 1940s were over, Jordan would enjoy 18 pop hits and utterly dominate the R&B; charts. A number of film appearances, and recorded duets with Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and even Bing Crosby, furthered his reputation as the outstanding black entertainer of the 1940s.

Although Jordan was a superb saxophonist and usually the most engaging instrumental soloist on his records, “he thought of himself more as a showman than a musician,” said his widow, Martha Jordan in a telephone interview from her home in Las Vegas. “When he went onstage, all he wanted to do was entertain the people, make them laugh, make them happy. Of course, the band was always aware of his musicianship. If you played anything derogatory to the music during the show, he would hear it, and tell you about it afterward.”

In retrospect, Jordan’s niche in American music is undeniable, but unfortunately an entertainer’s career is only as successful--in commercial terms--as his latest hit, and when the musical climate changed and the hits dried up during the early ‘50s, Jordan’s star went into eclipse. Nevertheless, he continued to perform and record in America and Europe, and his career seemed to be on the upswing again in the mid-’70s, when he made his first appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival. But not long after that performance, on Feb. 4, 1975, he suffered a fatal heart attack.

Jordan was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he was well on his way to being enshrined as the father of rhythm and blues, and by extension rock ‘n’ roll, even before the arrival of “Five Guys Named Moe.” But Martha Jordan isn’t alone in feeling that Louis Jordan has yet to receive the recognition that is his due.

“I’m looking at these stamps that are coming out, with pictures of Elvis Presley and Dinah Washington and Clyde McPhatter,” she says, “and I don’t see a stamp honoring Louis, without whom there would have been no rhythm and blues. The Grammys and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation have never recognized him, and you don’t hear his music on the radio. He was a great original, and a wonderful man in all kinds of ways, and you know, he started it all.”

* ON THE ROAD WITH ‘MOE’: After long runs in London and New York, “Five Guys Named Moe” hits L.A. Page 82