One of the most pervasive presences on the airwaves during his era, Ken Nordine launched his radio career in the 1950s and grew steadily more familiar across subsequent decades as a narrator, voice-over performer, and creator of albums featuring free-flowing, jazz-accompanied poetic improvisations he called “word jazz.” His delivery appeared in numerous radio and television commercials, while his artistic output developed alongside the beat poetry movement. The relaxed, frequently playful character of his spoken pieces produced not only multiple Word Jazz releases but also the 1966 album Colors, for which Nordine assigned distinctive personality traits to 34 separate hues, devoting a track to each.
Nordine entered the world in Cherokee, Iowa, in 1920. He later moved to Chicago and entered radio work during the 1940s and 1950s, functioning chiefly as a voice-over artist while also hosting a poetry program. In the middle of the 1950s, during a recitation of texts by Edgar Allan Poe and T.S. Eliot, he started interspersing his own darkly comic narratives; that shift opened the path to his initial word-jazz explorations, culminating in the first Word Jazz album in 1957. Accompanied by Chico Hamilton and his ensemble performing under the name the Fred Katz Group, Nordine’s fluid baritone verses and whimsical tales were set against swinging jazz arrangements. The debut record led to further installments in the series, among them 1958’s Son of Word Jazz and 1960’s Word Jazz, Vol. 2. Although many pieces leaned toward levity, Nordine’s writing also examined society and human behavior with a critical eye. In the early 1960s the Fuller Paint Company commissioned him to compose and record ten color-themed poems for use in advertising, capitalizing on his recognizable style to promote their paint line. Enjoying the project, he broadened the idea into the 1966 release Colors, layering spontaneous spoken associations about individual colors over light, airy jazz backings. Across the years Nordine worked with a wide array of artists and public figures, including Fred Astaire, Muppets creator Jim Henson, avant-garde multimedia artist Laurie Anderson, and, in the early 1990s, several members of the Grateful Dead both onstage and in the studio. His nationally syndicated radio program, likewise titled Word Jazz, continued for more than four decades, while he sustained additional creative activity through recordings such as 1979’s Stare with Your Ears, 1984’s electronic-sounding Triple Talk, and 2001’s Transparent Mask. In 2007 he appeared at the High Line Festival, which David Bowie programmed. Nordine passed away in Chicago in 2019 at the age of 98, remaining engaged in performance and artistic work until shortly before his death.
