The show is billed as the Stanley Jordan Trio, but don’t be surprised if you hear more than three instruments during Jordan’s run at Blue Note Hawaii.

Jordan, whose innovative guitar playing set the jazz world afire after he burst upon the scene in the 1980s, has started to bring piano, his first musical love, into performances.

He’ll sometimes perform on both at the same time — one hand on guitar, the other on the keyboard, seamlessly switching hands as he blends the sounds together. There’s an amazing YouTube video of him performing, of all things, Bartok in this way.

“I tried it a little in the beginning when I first started doing touch technique on guitar,” he said, “but I never started seriously working on it until 12 years ago, maybe 10 years ago even. Piano was my first instrument, so I do have a natural affinity for it, but I think part of why I was holding back was just that I’m real sensitive to people thinking that it was some kind of trick, like a gimmicky, novelty kind of thing.”

His concerns shouldn’t be surprising, because Jordan has been questioned about his musical directions before. Some critics disparaged his decision to play pop tunes — “Eleanor Rigby,” “Stairway to Heaven” — and have them billed as jazz. But few argued with the success of his 1985 debut album, “Magic Touch,” which spent 51 weeks atop the Billboard charts and has been called “an instant classic, and one of the definitive moments of modern jazz guitar” by AllMusic.com.

Few also question his brilliant touch technique, which involves tapping — “hammering” in guitar terminology — the guitar strings with the fingers of both hands, rather than one hand plucking and the other holding down the strings. With intricate arrangements worked out on his partially retuned Vigier Arpege guitar, Jordan enthralls music lovers with his ability to play textured, multivoiced songs that build harmony out of melody.

Jordan, 56, grew up in the Bay Area noodling on the family piano and started his formal musical training learning classical music on piano. Had his family not run into some tough times when he was about 10, he might have been a wunderkind on that instrument. He remembers going to a lesson unprepared and trying to bluff his way through his scales, and getting “caught” by his teacher.

“The interesting part for me was that when I made a mistake, I immediately knew what the mistake was,” he said. “There was that moment — it was fleeting — of realizing, ‘Wait a minute. I know these. This isn’t something I have to memorize. I already know how these things sound.’”

Jordan’s parents had to sell his piano, but he persuaded them to buy him a guitar. He always liked rock ’n’ roll, but when offered the choice to learn rock or jazz, he chose jazz because his teacher told him “jazz is more complicated, but with the things you’re going to learn, you can play rock anyway.”

He would go on to study music at Princeton, working with composer Milton Babbitt and computer music composer Paul Lansky. As a young performer, Jordan had the opportunity to play with Benny Carter and Dizzy Gillespie, leading to wider recognition of his abilities.

His decision to mix piano and guitar came with the recording of his 2008 album, “State of Nature,” which he said was “all about people and nature: Where did we go wrong? How can we get that balance again? Just trying to use music to find some personal answers to that and trying to restore some balance to that.”

He had begun considering whether he could justify devoting all his time and energy to guitar, when he loved piano just as much.

“I finally realized that when I play piano there’s a naturalness to it,” he said. “It’s a natural instrument for me to play, and so I shouldn’t be worrying about anything but that. … I find that when I sit at the piano, I make music, and it’s all about music.”

The result is no gimmick. When the two instruments are playing in the same register, rather than one playing high and other low, the sound blends together to create extraordinary colors and timbres, as if the sound waves are reinforcing each other to create something entirely new and unique.

“Sometimes with two musicians playing, you hit those moments, but when it’s just me I can just go for certain things,” Jordan said.

Jordan has performed here before, but said he’s really looking forward to his performances at Blue Note Hawaii. He’s hoping to connect with local musicians and expects the show to evolve over the five-night gig.

“I have some new things that I’m exploring that I’m really excited about,” he said. “I’m using the piano a lot these days. It’s still mostly guitar but the piano’s becoming more important.”