Stanley Jordan was born in Chicago on July 31, 1959. His family lived in Baltimore and Philadelphia before settling in Northern California when he was about five, where his father worked in the electronics industry of what became Silicon Valley. He began classical piano at six and moved to guitar at eleven, playing in rock and soul bands as a teenager; the music of Jimi Hendrix drew him to the instrument and then toward jazz. While still in high school he retuned the guitar in fourths and began tapping notes onto the fretboard with both hands, in the manner of a keyboard player, and in 1976 he won an award at the Reno Jazz Festival.

He enrolled at Princeton University in 1977 and graduated in 1981 with a degree in music. He studied theory and composition with Milton Babbitt and computer music with Paul Lansky, and he played with Benny Carter and Dizzy Gillespie while still a student. After graduation he toured as a solo act through the Northeast, Midwest and Southeast, selling his self-produced album Touch Sensitive (Tangent, 1982) at his own shows; he has said his first professional engagement was at the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville. In 1984 he moved to New York and played on the streets, auditioned for the promoter George Wein, and gave an unannounced set at that year's Kool Jazz Festival. He also opened for Wynton Marsalis at Avery Fisher Hall.

Bruce Lundvall had offered him a recording contract earlier, which Jordan turned down because he did not feel ready. When Lundvall became president of the relaunched Blue Note label in 1985, Jordan was the first artist he signed. Magic Touch (1985), produced by Al Di Meola, spent 51 weeks at number one on Billboard's jazz chart, a record, and was eventually certified gold; it earned two Grammy nominations. Jordan also took part in the Blue Note reunion concert at Town Hall in New York on February 22, 1985, released as part of the One Night with Blue Note series, whose lineup also included Charles Lloyd, Michel Petrucciani, Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette. Standards Volume 1 (1986) was recorded as a solo guitar session with no overdubs, he played on Stanley Clarke's Hideaway (1986), and he made a cameo appearance in the Blake Edwards film Blind Date (1987).

Flying Home (EMI-Manhattan, 1988), produced by Preston Glass, moved toward funk and rock and reached number six on Billboard's Top Contemporary Jazz Albums chart. Cornucopia (Blue Note, 1990) paired his own writing with live quartet sessions featuring pianist Kenny Kirkland, bassist Charnett Moffett and drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts, and its version of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" brought a Grammy nomination in 1991. Stolen Moments (1991) was a trio date with Moffett and the drummer Kenwood Dennard, recorded live at Blue Note Tokyo in November 1990. He released Bolero on Arista in 1994 after leaving Blue Note, and he created the startup sound for the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100 and 8100 computers.

In 1995 he moved to Arizona and settled in Sedona, stepping back from the major-label cycle. He became an artist-spokesperson for the American Music Therapy Association, and a 2013 newspaper profile described him as working toward a master's degree in music therapy at Arizona State University. His recordings in those years included the Web-released solo set Relaxing Music for Difficult Situations, I (2003), the raga-based Ragas with the sitarist Jay Kishor, and Dreams of Peace (2003) with the Italian band Novecento. He returned to a record label with State of Nature (Mack Avenue, 2008), on which he added piano and played two guitars at once, and followed it with Friends (2011), with guests including Kenny Garrett, Nicholas Payton and Christian McBride, and Duets (2015) with the guitarist Kevin Eubanks. Four Grammy nominations, none of them wins, stand on his record: two for Magic Touch in 1986, one for "What's Goin' On" in 1991, and one for his version of "Steppin' Out" in 2009.

Since about 2019 he has toured a program of Jimi Hendrix's music called Stanley Plays Jimi. In 2026 he issued the singles "Meditation," a duet with the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento (May), "Flight of the Eagle" (August 28), his first new original composition in 14 years, and "Venezuelan Waltz No. 3" with the guitarist Sharon Isbin (October 30), previews of a new album, Feather in the Wind, announced for fall 2026. His daughter, Julia Jordan, is a singer and songwriter.

Jordan's touch technique is a form of two-handed tapping: he sounds each note by hammering a finger onto the fretboard, controlling volume by the force of the impact, so that each hand can play its own line, and he plays more legato than most tappers. One player can cover melody, chords and bass at once, play two guitars together, or play guitar with one hand and piano with the other, as he does on State of Nature. He tunes in perfect fourths, E-A-D-G-C-F, which he has said simplifies the fingerboard, and for years his main guitar was a Vigier built with a flat fingerboard and extremely low action to suit the technique. He was not the first to tap on a guitar, and Milton Babbitt had devised a related interval system at Princeton, but Jordan's command of it, applied to standards, pop songs and original compositions, made it a signature sound of the 1980s. Al Di Meola likened his approach to a keyboardist's, since he neither picks nor strums.

Hendrix started him on guitar, and his route into jazz ran through Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and George Benson; Bach and Mozart, learned through his childhood piano lessons, remain central to him. Critics have split on his catalogue: Magic Touch is widely cited as a defining moment of modern jazz guitar, while some reviewers found the funk-leaning Flying Home weaker, and he has said that returning to piano freed him to play the guitar more conventionally in his later work. The guitarist Joe Bonamassa has compared Matteo Mancuso to him as a reinventor of the instrument, according to Mancuso's profile.