What the eye hears, p.47
What the Eye Hears, page 47
Around 1975, he got a job dancing in a production of Evolution of the Blues, a historical revue by the jazz singer Jon Hendricks. Brown was short, slight, low-riding. His body draped as loosely as the large double-breasted suit jackets he favored. He let his arms swing, and the soft folding of his elbows reflected the folding of his knees as they lifted his feet, rarely more than a few inches high. His body language physicalized the attitude behind his favorite expression, “Can you dig it?” He called his style Scientific Rhythm, the adjective apparently intended (as in minstrel days) to emphasize the tight logic of his impromptu constructions. His dancing generally contrasted strolling-in-place phrases with spurts of double time, his punctuating pauses as important as the ricocheting stamps before them, accents popping off in unusual places like minishocks of static electricity. Brown was such a thorough improviser that you could watch his appearance in Evolution of the Blues night after night and never hear the same thing twice. That was the experience of a twenty-six-year-old modern dancer named Camden Richman, and it changed her life.
Richman convinced Brown to teach her. This meant visiting the home of the aging bachelor, rousing him out of bed, giving him his medicine, sobering him up, then trying to absorb as much as possible as he danced on an old piece of wood in the basement. Usually, Brown couldn’t remember the step he had just done, but if Richman could catch it, it was hers, he said. This was the philosophy he imparted to the many students who followed. Unlike many of his black contemporaries, he was eager to be videotaped; after a taping, he would eagerly ask, “Is it in the box?” “It was more than just picking up steps as fast as you can,” Richman would recall. “It’s the way he moves and the way he approaches them. You find it in yourself how to do that.” Brown encouraged individual expression, which he pronounced “express-see-ohn.” Asked to explain improvisation, he once said, “I like to get up and let myself go down strange paths. I don’t know where I’m going … There’s a little man in there telling me what to do.”
When Honi Coles came to San Francisco with Bubbling Brown Sugar, Richman went backstage and introduced herself as a “tap percussionist.” She asked for lessons from him, too, and Coles granted them. “And, like, I didn’t have to see what he did,” she would recall. “I wasn’t watching so much as I was listening.” Richman was fascinated by tap’s past, reverent toward it, but she also had ideas about the future. She formed a jazz trio to try them out.
* * *
Something was coming together. Richman took classes with Lynn Dally, another modern dancer, a little older, who had been raised as a tap dancer. Dally’s father, Jimmy Rawlins, was a retired vaudevillian who ran a rigorous dancing school in Columbus, Ohio. When Dally enrolled at Ohio State in 1959, she brought her tap shoes with her, but at the audition for the university dance ensemble, she noticed that everyone else was barefoot. University dance departments had been created by modern dancers, a clan that didn’t consider tap worthy of academic study. Into a locker went Dally’s shoes, there to remain, at least metaphorically, for more than a decade. She got a master’s degree in dance, taught, and eventually formed her own dance company in California, while teaching at UCLA. Fred Strickler, who had grown up as a scholarship student at the Rawlins studio, also studied dance at Ohio State. Drawn by the same cultural wind, he moved west to join a modern-dance company (Bella Lewitsky’s) and teach. He followed this path independently, but reconnected in Los Angeles with Dally, who introduced him to Richman, who told him about Honi Coles and Eddie Brown.
But when Strickler and Dally went to see the L.A. production of Evolution of the Blues, it featured the tapping of Foster Johnson. “He had a white Afro,” Strickler would remember. “This was the Angela Davis era. A beautiful man. Danced like quicksilver, like sand pouring from a bottle. I was awestruck.” Born in Virginia around 1917, Johnson had worked on TOBA with the Whitman Sisters and danced (sometimes in a duo with Bobby Johnson) with the best big bands at the Cotton Club, at the Apollo, and in Vegas. After the war, he ran the Finale Club, a hip jazz joint in Los Angeles. By the fifties, the press was referring to him as “the former tap dancer,” an emcee who taught. He drove a forklift, edited a magazine, and made it back onstage as a ballroom dancer, which informed his gliding style once he laced up his tap shoes again in the seventies. Handsome, articulate, and ultra-urbane, he might have made as fine an elder statesman for tap as Honi Coles. But he would die, of an aortic aneurism, in 1981.
The night that Dally saw him, Johnson recognized her from when he had taught at her father’s studio. “You’re Lynny,” he said, grabbing her cheeks. Lessons were arranged.
Dally and Strickler also began practicing tap together, smoking dope and remembering things they didn’t know they knew and revaluing their early training. Hooking up with Richman, they started choreographing tap pieces. People wanted more, so a company was formed: three dancers and three musicians. They called themselves the Jazz Tap Percussion Ensemble, the name serving to emphasize historical roots and a collective ideal—a collaborative of musicians, not dancers plus accompaniment.
Their concerts experimented with configurations: Richman and Dally with the bassist, Strickler with the drummer, the dancers without the musicians or vice versa. The music was a mix of originals and jazz standards, picking up where jazz and tap had gotten estranged to assimilate now-classic bebop compositions. The dances went in and out of time, testing out sonic possibilities, including silence. Dally’s choreography showed the most obvious modern-dance influence, incorporating torso movements that were neither functional nor strictly decorative, seminarrative concepts, and clipped endings. Strickler’s background and intelligence came through in the exploratory shape of his dances, best exemplified by “Tacet Understanding,” a brooding, introspective solo of cumulative and degenerative patterns. Body percussion pieces by the drummer, Keith Terry, were clever and amusing. Richman’s work was the closest to the approach of her teachers, even when she was in flirty conversation with her boyfriend’s New Wave playing of the electric bass.
Because Dally sometimes wore her hair short and Rod Stewart–spiky, reviewers called her “funky,” but there seemed to be a permanent tilt to her head. Trying for thoughtfulness or bluesy soul, her body went slack and floppy. Strickler, with a patrician nose, was the most balletic in carriage, casual but also rigid. The entertainer in him snuck out in smirks during show-off solos titled “Cadenza” or “Tone Poem.” Richman had more charisma. A gamine brunette, fragile-tough in leg warmers and a ponytail, she had absorbed Honi Coles’s speed and floor-skimming lightness. She could be ungainly, too, landing in a deep squat like an impudent kid; it was easy to imagine her playing Peter Pan. That sense of play, combined with her beauty, made her stand out, yet the ensemble was remarkably balanced, very much a six-way conversation, which kept things interesting through a full concert.
Compared with the style of Coles, much less to Broadway or Hollywood modes, the group sensibility was, as Arlene Croce wrote, “a little overstarched.” When the dancers put their hands in their pockets, the gesture seemed more a reference to casualness than casualness itself. The company could also exude a soft-edged quality that was stereotypically Californian. But in interviews and lecture demonstrations, their mentors were all they talked about. For the ensemble’s New York debut in December 1979, it opened with a piece made by Foster Johnson and closed with one dedicated to Coles. While on the East Coast, the dancers met Brenda Bufalino, Jane Goldberg, and the rest of the community to which they now realized they belonged. They participated, as students, in Goldberg’s By Word of Foot festival, and when their group performed at the Smithsonian in 1982—by then the name had been shortened to the Jazz Tap Ensemble—it started a tradition by bringing along a venerable guest artist: Honi Coles.
* * *
Tapdancin’, a documentary directed by Christian Blackwood in 1979, is a survey of tap in the late seventies. It opens with the Hoofers grunting through the Track and includes footage of a Copasetics show, the Nicholas Brothers in Vegas, and Jerry Ames doing Morton Gould’s Tap Dance Concerto in a tight white jumpsuit and a paisley shirt with a butterfly collar. No dance is shown in full, and as the film cuts quickly, the juxtapositions serve to make the Jazz Tap Ensemble look precious, the Nicholas Brothers shallow, and Ames ludricrous. All the same, Tapdancin’ captures Maceo Anderson happily marveling at the difference between the old Four Step Brothers days, when he would fight if someone stole his steps, and a present in which he gives them away. John Bubbles seethes at the opportunities denied him—“To get on the stage you had to be everything else but what you were … world’s greatest dancer … janitor,” he says, and the way he spits out the last word is frightening—while Honi Coles’s take on historical injustice turns enervating: “I think I’d have had the opportunity of an Astaire or Kelly if I’d been white. But if I’d been white maybe I wouldn’t have been a dancer.”
George T. Nierenberg’s No Maps on My Taps, released the same year, is a narrower, deeper film. It concentrates on three dancers, all pushing sixty as they prepare for a public challenge backed by Lionel Hampton’s band at Small’s Paradise in Harlem. The men are vivid: Sandman Sims the wiry extrovert, Bunny Briggs the sad-eyed gentleman, Chuck Green a sort of autistic savant. A fragment of song Green makes up gives the film its title: a metaphor for improvisational, individualistic freedom. But Nierenberg’s camera also takes in the flip side—the extent to which Green is lost, the hurt child in Briggs’s faded-matinee-idol glamour, the bluster in Sims’s bravado and his tender heart. The performance at Small’s was an anachronism arranged by the filmmaker, though Hampton was one of the only bandleaders to hire tap dancers in the seventies. A phone call in the film between Green and John Bubbles is almost absurdly contrived, and the sidewalk arguments look fake, yet this tension between the film’s documentary aspects and its apparent artifice makes it more poignant, drawing out the extent to which these men were always performing. As Green once explained, “You’re supposed to be someone, a make-belief—for the public in general, not only in the theater. You have to play the part all the time.”
The film took five years to make. Nierenberg, who was twenty-seven when it was released, was another member of his generation fascinated by tap history and shocked by his ignorance. He also recorded oral histories with Bubbles and Green, ten to thirteen hours each, that document the difficulty of interviewing these men. Bubbles is self-aggrandizing and irascible, berating Nierenberg for not understanding whenever Nierenberg asks a question. Green speaks figuratively, chuckling. Before the interview, Dee Bradley, the British widow of Buddy Bradley and girlfriend of Baby Laurence, advised Nierenberg that feeding Green walnuts would make him more lucid. Nierenberg followed that advice, but long tracts of the tape drift back and forth teasingly across the edge of sense. “I like to talk about into these degrees,” Green says, “because someday, the world is going to want to take baths in these things.” Here he is at the end of the interview, stuffed with walnuts, explaining why he never quit dancing:
Well, there’s what you call registration. Without registration, there’s no force. There is no censorships to oppress you. If you could understand the physics of, uh, showboat. Which is something we are indebted to for all this new technologies that’s going on today. The showboat is like a scratch rock is to the ancients [the Injuns?]. Understand? We must always have a family head. If you’re gonna be an author, you must have a library. And we must never give out of describing the immensities of compassion, which is some sort of power that God has distributed to, see, our great greats. Like: the higher you go, the closer you see. Shed God’s graces in the places to be.
No Maps on My Taps was partially funded by the NEA. It was broadcast on PBS and later on the BBC. Nierenberg packaged showings of the film with a live performance by its three stars (sometimes with Buster Brown and Jimmy Slyde as additions or substitutions), a touring double bill that made real the kind of gig the film had to fake. Traveling with Green posed challenges, such as when Green had to pass through metal detectors and would pull item after item from his many layers of clothing, a collection of junk emerging like clowns from a clown car. The show was presented at the Smithsonian, where tap had a new friend in the institution’s dance consultant, Sali Ann Kriegsman. She had caught the tap bug at a Jane Goldberg show, and she told audiences that it was shameful that a dance historian such as herself had been unaware of Baby Laurence when he was performing nearby. Penitent, she hired Slyde and Steve Condos.
Condos was also featured in About Tap, a half-hour documentary Nierenberg released in 1985. Where No Maps is dramatic and biographical, About Tap is a film essay in tap aesthetics. Chuck Green says, “You can’t always do what you want to do. You have to do what’s needed.” Condos lays out his method of building beats into rolls, explaining how shifting the accents (“sculpting” the rhythm, he calls it) keeps those otherwise mechanical patterns alive. “I leave my body alone,” he says. “Whatever it does after my feet talk, that’s unconscious.” And that’s how it looks, like a linebacker doing one of those keep-the-feet-moving drills. Of all the hoofers to come out of retirement, Condos was probably the most freed up. The new context gave him permission to be the pure musician he had always wanted to be. “I get in a trance,” he once explained, “and the only thing that wakes me up is if somebody applauds.” Condos still sang songs and cracked one-liners, but his late style was visually plain—save for his face, which brimmed with joy. It’s possible that no one ever loved tap more than Steve Condos. In About Tap, Nierenberg films him dancing against a simulation of a star-pricked sky. When Condos accelerates into a roll, his face lights up and you could believe he’s about to blast off.
The presence of Condos, the improvising white elder with Philadelphia street cred and a Hollywood résumé, complicated the race issue. In No Maps on My Taps, Sandman Sims makes a point, echoed by Bubbles in Tapdancin’, about how blacks dance from the soul and whites from counts. At one level, this was a difference in pedagogy. Dancing-school teachers counted out rhythms; hoofers scatted. Counts are less efficient and less expressive than scatting, and since they break down after a few levels of rhythmic subdivision, they’re of limited use. (Even Paul Draper complained about this; it’s why he wanted tappers to learn to read music.) But that wasn’t what Sims and Bubbles were driving at. They were making a heart-versus-head argument, a division that supposedly broke down along racial lines. In an interview with a black researcher, Sims said that his art was not America’s heritage but Africa’s. “They mixed it in with our dancing. That’s where you got ‘tap dancing.’ But hoofing is like … they say beauty’s skin deep but ugly is all the way to the bone.”
Sims was right that there had been mixing. Back in 1876, a writer for the Times had judged dancing according to values similar to his, praising an impromptu quality of “genuine American invention” that can’t be learned over the arithmetical calculations of ballet. That writer was praising blackface minstrels. In No Maps on My Taps, Sims says, “For us this will probably be the last hooray,” but he also says, “There will be others.” He could have been more accurate: in 1979, there already were.
16
LINEAGE
PRODIGAL SON
Gregory Hines is standing in the alley behind the Apollo, reminiscing about the many hours he spent in that spot as a child performer three decades prior. In this scene from the 1985 documentary About Tap, he recalls the attention paid to him by Sandman Sims, an adult who took the time to trade steps with a kid—who took the kid seriously, pushing him to work on his weak left side. Watching Sims, Hines says, he could see himself “as a man.” He singles out the moment when, after trying to steal steps from Teddy Hale by watching his act multiple times, he realized that Hale had no routine, that Hale was improvising. He remembers what older hoofers had to say when Hines, then nine, declared that he wanted to be Teddy Hale. “‘That’s great,’ they said, ‘but you can’t hope to be a great artist, like he is, by copying him. No, you have to take all these steps that you’re stealing from him and that we’re feeding you and assimilate it. And have it come out in your own way, in your own style.’” Each of his heroes had that: a style. Hines says he can recognize each one with his eyes closed. He says he owes them everything: “I found myself through them.”
First there was his brother, Maurice, two years older. At four or five, Maurice was already enrolled in a neighborhood tap class. Gregory was supposedly too young, but he could copy his brother’s steps. Their mother sought out the best teacher around, and in the late forties that was Henry LeTang. As a Harlem kid in the twenties, LeTang had himself started out at the Peter Pan Kiddies School before graduating to Buddy Bradley’s. He also studied at the Hoofers’ Club and backstage with Bubbles. The Cotton Club said he was too short, but he toured with Sophie Tucker’s son, billed as “Bert Tucker and Friend.” By 1937, he had opened a Times Square studio of his own, following in Bradley’s footsteps, grooming white stars and choreographing Broadway shows and nightclub acts for which he sometimes got credit. Like Bradley, LeTang could cater to people with minimal dancing talent. He likened his job to that of a tailor and frankly labeled it “commercial.” Most of his students were white. Profiled by Ebony in 1948, he gave his take on racial difference. The average Negro hoofer, in his experience, had no more “natural rhythm” than the average white dancer. But the average Negro tended to learn faster and work harder—perhaps, LeTang suggested, because the field for Negro dancers was so much smaller.
LeTang didn’t normally teach children, but he saw something in the Hines kids. He gave the boys private lessons, standing between them and holding their hands as they mimicked his steps. He made them take ballet and he brought them to the Apollo, both to perform and to study. The theater was their day care center. Alma Hines regularly dropped off her sons to watch three or four shows while she was at work. In the audience and in the wings and in the alley out back, the boys soaked up a tradition on the wane. Once in the mid-fifties, they watched as Bubbles performed on a bill that was otherwise rock and roll. Maurice and Gregory figured the audience would reject the old man, but the veteran sang “Shine” and the crowd loved him. “So we went to his dressing room afterward,” Maurice would remember. “And we asked him how he did it. And he said, ‘Always tell the truth to the audience. Don’t pretend to be something you aren’t. They’ll know. And they’ll get you.’” Apollo audiences loved the Hines Kids, too. In 1954, they were cast as a newsboy and a shoeshiner in the Broadway show The Girl in Pink Tights. People were saying they might be the next Nicholas Brothers, a prediction that Maurice and Gregory believed until they saw the Nicholas Brothers.
