Savion Glover

I went to see Savion Glover perform last night at the Prospect Park bandshell. I was going to title this post "Not Your Father's Tap Dance" - but after thinking it over, I think Glover's dance has many precedents. They may not be from my father's generation, though. More like my grandfather - and his father.

Glover really is one - clearly the leading - member of a quintet. The bassist came on and after a short while Glover appeared - to appreciative applause. He dances on a relatively small raised platform. He wears what look like boots with a relatively high heel with metal taps. He is one of two percussive performers in the quintet which includes piano, bass, drums, reeds - plus Glover. In fact, there were at times three percussion players as the bassist occasionally used his instrument like a drum.

The music reminded me of Coltrane. In fact, the program notes refer to a project with Glover entitled "IF TRANE WUZ HERE." Glover's looks at the audience. In fact, the dance is clearly about sound rather than appearance. But it is fascinating to hear. He uses a series of rolls, stomps and toe jabs to produce sound of considerable rhythmic complexity. The kind of music which his quintet performs is not "dance" music - although it did have a swinging propulsion to it. And the audience loved it! dancing is not visually interesting. He wears ordinary street clothes and rarely uses his upper body. He infrequently

Bill Robinson made a "B" movie called Harlem Is Heaven in which he does his stair dance in a nightclub. The dance sequence is available on a DVD entitled At the Jazz Band Ball and here on YouTube. Glover's performance reminded of this dance. Robinson performs to the tune "Swanee River." Like Glover, he does not look frequently at the audience. (There are a couple of breakaway shots of the audience in the sequence - and they seem oblivious of Robinson). Like Glover, Robinson does very little with his upper body and his movement is pretty much limited to climbing and descending the stairs. Unlike Glover, Robinson is not portrayed as a member of a musical ensemble - he is accompanied only by piano.

Robinson recorded his taps on several occasions. He performed "Doin' the New Lowdown" with the Don Redman band in December 1932; "Ain't Misbehavin'" with Irving Mills and His Hotsy Totsy Gang in September 1929 and "Living in a Great Big Way" with Fats Waller in 1935.

And radio performances of tap dance must have been fairly common in the 1930s. In the film Big Broadcast of 1936, Robinson is shown reclining in a barber's chair while listening to the Nicholas Brothers dance over the radio. In The Black Network, the Nicholas Brothers again perform over the radio. (This short subject is available on the DVD Hallelujah). So the percussive, aural experience of tap has always been integral to the form - although no one could ever accuse the Nicholas Brothers of being indifferent to their visual presentation.

And Glover is not the first tapper to dance with bop jazz accompaniment. In 1945, the Nicholas Brothers toured with the Dizzy Gillespie big band - which included Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro and Max Roach. The tour was called Hepstations 1945 and travelled through southern states including the Carolinas, Mississippi and Alabama. Audience reaction was unfavorable but Constance Valis Hills quotes Harold Nicholas as saying: "Down South, they wanna hear the blues, get with it. . . . But we understood it, the musicians understood it, and so we were having a ball."

In 1946, a tap dancer named Ralph Brown appeared in a TV segment entitled "Jivin' in Bebop" with Gillespie's orchestra and sextet - and danced to the Charlie Parker tune "Ornithology." Brown was a huge fan of Bill Robinson. (Although in the book Tap!, Brown calls himself an "eccentric" dancer. "I also got around and did a lot of movements, spins and stuff, all that sort of thing." In that respect, he was clearly a different type of dancer than Robinson)

So, as the Good Book says, there's nothing new under the sun - although in this case it was under the moon and around 9:30 pm, this writer - who is not a night owl - headed home. In part that was because I'd been up late earlier in the week at a couple of other JVC Jazz Festival events. Of particular note was a concert called Clarinet Marmalade. It featured a clarinetist named Evan Christopher who really blew me away. If you see this guy's CDs - buy them!!! He's fantastic.