Almost all the sleeve-note writers on the original albums here make something of Jordan's apparent Sonny Rollins influence. Listened to now, with a dash of hindsight, he sounds less budget-Sonny than deluxe-individual. There's no way anyone could mistake his muted, slightly choppy delivery for, say, Junior Cook or Hank Mobley, the two tenors who bookend him in the tenor lineage of the Horace Silver quintet. The opening, eponymous Blue Note is a set typical of its time, with a phalanx of young bloods (Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller et al.) running the usual gamut from blues to Broadway. Blowing In From Chicago yokes him with fellow Windy City tenor John Gilmore – in hard bop rather than outer-space mode – in front of a rhythm section that might have unseated a lesser frontline: Horace Silver, Curly Russell and Art Blakey. It's probably the strongest of the Blue Note's, the later Cliff Craft, with Jordan's fellow Silverite Art Farmer, having an air of hasty preparation to it. The real gem, however, is the saxophonist's 1962 set for Jazzland, Bearcat, the only quartet session heard here, which shows how Jordan was determined to stamp his own identity on a format that was elsewhere becoming the signature property of one J. Coltrane. Jordan was altogether more Janus-faced than Coltrane though: throughout these sets there are some decidedly old-school song choices (‘Sophisticated Lady’, ‘Beyond The Blue Horizon’), as well as suggestions of what was to come (the young J.C. Moses appears on Bearcat). Very generously timed (one disc runs to nearly 82 minutes) and cleanly remastered, this twofer makes an ideal introduction to a player who may be an unfamiliar name to younger listeners.