Tap Dancing America by Hill Constance Valis;

Author:Hill, Constance Valis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Resurgence

Whether or not jazz tap dancers gave the rhythmic ideas of bebop to drummers, it was indeed through the synergistic process of drum-and-dance, plus the new musical ideas of bebop, that there emerged in the 1970s a new breed of modern jazz (tap) dancers. Some of them, notably Honi Coles and Chuck Green, straddled the musical tradition of the swing era in which they were raised while at the same time forging transitions to the modernity of bebop. Others, like Baby Laurence, Leon Collins, Will Gaines, Bunny Briggs, and Jimmy Slyde, moved more vigorously toward severing ties with swing and even the transitions that were made, in order to explore the modern expressions of bop and hard bop. This path paralleled that of drummers such as Max Roach with the Miles Davis band, and Danny Richmond with the Charlie Mingus band, who were exploring a more interactive role in the ensemble—sometimes abandoning the role of time-keeper altogether to create a palette of rhythmic textures through spontaneous improvisation.

It was within this interactive fervor of exploring new roles for time-keeping and discovering more expressive positioning of drum and dance that in the 1970s there emerged a reunion of tap dancers and jazz musicians; it was not the big band format on the giant stages of New York’s Roxy or Palace Theatres, as in the 1930s and ‘40s, but in small intimate jazz clubs. There were also a number of unusual venues and alternative “found spaces” where tap dancers entwined themselves with the jazz combo. As tap dancers were beginning to emerge from nearly two decades of virtual unemployment, their reengagement came from opportunities to perform in a number of musical venues, however small, slight, cramped, or underground. It was the dual-pronged thrust of the old and the new—the unquenchable thirst for both classic 1920s jazz and the forward-moving modern jazz—that synergized the so-called tap resurgence of the 1970s.

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