“Jazz is a chance music,” says Edward “Kidd” Jordan, a music explorer, a lover of 20th century music, an educator, a saxophonist and the patriarch of one of New Orleans many musical families. Kidd is noted to be one of a very few jazz musicians in New Orleans keeping creative music, outside jazz, avant garde jazz, or whatever one might call it, alive in this city.

(Kidd explains that the term "avant garde," which is perhaps the most common terminology for free jazz, is a military te...