Footwork Phenomenon: Savion Glover Returns!

by Susan Kepecs

Savion Glover returns to the Wisconsin Union Theater stage on Thursday, Nov. 10 – exactly three years minus two days after his last performance here.  The master tapper touched down in Madison on Nov. 8, 2008 (just four days after Obama won the presidential election, to put that in perspective), bringing us Bare Soundz, a stripped down performance featuring Glover with fellow hoofers Marshall Davis Jr. and Maurice Chestnut, dancing – apparently effortlessly, but I saw sweat flying – on three amplified platforms.  They played bebop with their feet, trading eights and swapping solos like the jazzmen they are, flaunting their astonishing ability to play recognizable tunes with nothing other than beats, breath, and bits of metal tacked to the bottoms of their shoes. 

        From what I can glean about the show Glover’s bringing this time, SoLe Sanctuary, it’s similarly pure, but it has props – some audio clues, including a section from John Coltrane’s Love Supreme, plus posters of Glover’s artistic ancestors and an altar to a pair of tap shoes that assumably belonged to one of those beloved, departed mentors.  (For more info on Glover and those who came before, see the background piece I wrote for Isthmus in 2008, attached below)

        SoLe Sanctuary features Glover and Marshall Davis Jr., an onstage partnership that began with the original 1995 Broadway production of Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk, which catapulted Glover to global fame. Last week I had a chance to talk to him about his dancing, and this show.  The king of tap is strikingly possessive of his artform, and you can agree with him on that issue or not.  But everything he had to say points clearly to this: what he does onstage comes straight from his heart. And that’s what distinguishes art from mere entertainment.  Here are his responses to my queries, in his own words:

CulturalOyster: Last time we talked you described working with Lon Cheney, Chuck Green, Gregory Hines and all the others from that time – and how thankful you were for their teachings.  So it feels like SoLe Sanctuary is a project that’s been in your heart for a long time – can you tell me about that? 

Glover: First, SoLe Sanctuary isn’t a production. The whole idea of it is just what I do.  What you have to understand is that whatever I’ve done outside Broadway is all about dedications to my mentors, the pioneers of this artform.  It’s all something I live with and express in every performance I do.  It just happens that this is the first time I’ve said that out loud, and with the pictures I use onstage.

CulturalOyster: What’s the basis of this show – do you and Marshall Davis take steps learned from the greats and improvise on them?  If we in the audience were educated enough to know the styles of the elders, would we recognize them?

Glover: Yes, and again, this concept is in everything I do.  We take the steps and routines and rhythms of the pioneers and build on them. If you’re familiar with Chuck Green, or Gregory Hines, when you see one of their steps done by us it’s an homage, a form of respect.  But they taught us by saying ‘Don’t just do what we do.  Don’t steal my step, but take it and do something with it.’  So aside from any of our own steps that we may come up with, Marshall and I are just up there enjoying each others’ company and enjoying the sound. 

CulturalOyster: How is your own style unique – different from those who came before?

Glover: I think my style is similar to what my mentors did.  What separates it from the other tap dancers of today is that our approach to the dance – I’m speaking for myself and these men who are no longer here – is more spiritual, more about communion, than about entertaining.

CulturalOyster: In the program notes you call yourself and Marshall Davis Jr. “the last hoofers standing.”  Do you really feel there’s no future for your art form?

Glover: I feel that the future is within me, within us – so there is, God willing, a hopeful and bright future as long as I stay on the path I’m on.  I was blessed and fortunate to be with a handful of those great men who invented the art form.  They’re not around any more, so the kids today aren’t getting that same energy and attention.  I have students, but I’m only one person.  There’s no comparing that to what I had.  I do my best to allow my students to understand the artform, but we don’t necessarily need more good [tap] dancers – we had greats and there’ll be nothing greater than those men.  What we need is more awareness – more writers, more literaries.  We need the dance to be spoken about so we can remember those men.  It’s just like the music – we need more conversation about Coltrane and his contribution to the earth, more discussion about Miles [Davis], Sidney Bechet, Van Gogh, Gauguin. It [hoofing] isn't meant for everyone.  I am not the biggest genius, but I have a gift for the dance, for what I express.  Some young people just ain't got it.  Their brilliance isn't in dance, it's elsewhere, but they just want to be onstage.  That's not going to help.

        ***********************************************************

(the following piece first appeared in Isthmus, under the title “Savion Glover Stretches the Boundaries of Tap," on Nov. 6, 2008)

by Susan Kepecs

Savion Glover brings his neo-bebop happy feet to the Wisconsin Union Theater Saturday night. In his current touring repertory show, Bare Soundz, he plys his renowned rhythm taps on a rangy set of African diaspora beats.

            A child prodigy, Glover made his Broadway debut at 12 in Tap Dance Kid. At 22 he copped two Tonys, for his performance and choreography in Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk. He's a superstar at 34. Even if you're not a hoofer habitué you've seen Glover tap on TV. He's done everything from PBS specials to commercials and even Dancing with the Stars, though glitz isn't his game. Glover's biggest claim to fame is that he's taken an art form born in the 19th century and rendered it new for the 21st. That's no small feat.

            When I was a dance class kid in the '50s, the Golden Age of movie musicals was done. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were out; Balanchine's ballets, Martha Graham, Agnes De Mille's revolutionary musicals were in. Tap was relegated to the warpy wood floors of second-rate Dolly Dinkle ballet schools. Glover's usually credited with saving tap dance, though that's not quite right. The liquid, lanky-faced dancer / actor Gregory Hines, star of movies I loved like Frances Ford Coppola's Cotton Club (1984) and White Nights with Mikhail Baryshnikov (1985), was the real bridge between the legendary rhythm tappers and the genre's resurgence. Hines was Glover's mentor. But it's Glover, with his trademark dreads and baggy threads, who made hoofin' hip for the next generation.

           

How Glover came to be crowned tap dance king seems like destiny, even to an atheist like me. He was dancing in utero, his mother, Yvette Glover, says in Savion! My Life in Tap, Glover's autobio as told to New York Times writer Bruce Weber. The Lord wanted to call this rhythmic child Savior, the story goes, but Glover's mom prudently swapped the "r" for an "n."

            "My mom was a singer," Glover tells me on the phone. "She was very heavy in the church and jazz as well. So she had her career. Music was all throughout my family. My grandmother was a minister of music, my grandfather was a musician. That's where my inspiration comes from, having a happy family and giving thanks to God that I'm alive and able to express myself through dance."

            Yvette Glover, a single mother in economically depressed Newark, N.J., scraped together what it took to send seven year old Savion to tap class. No Dolly Dinkle school would do. Glover got his first glimpse of glinty Teletone taps at the Hines-Hatchett studio (owned by Gregory Hines' older brother Maurice) in midtown Manhattan, where legendary hoofers still hung out. "The day my mom signed me up I saw Chuck Green and Lon Chaney [the tapper, not the actor]," he says. "I was pretty turned on."

            Glover's trademark lightning-speed, polyrhythmic style didn't quite happen overnight. "I started like everybody else," he says.

            That means Maxi Fords and shufflin' off to Buffalo, but Glover mastered the elements in minutes and zoomed ahead. At 10 he auditioned for Broadway / film choreographer Henry LeTang, who got the young rhythm whiz cast in the 1984 Broadway production of Tap Dance Kid. Five years later Glover found himself in the Paris production of Black and Blue, a tribute to African-American music directed by Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli, a pair of Argentinian showmen whose previous song and dance revues included Tango Argentino and Flamenco Puro. LeTang won a Tony for his choreography in Black and Blue, which featured a 13-piece jazz orchestra, R&B diva Ruth "Mama he Treats Your Daughter Mean" Brown and a pantheon of iconic hoofers including Lon Chaney, Chuck Green, Bunny Briggs, Jimmy Slyde and the elegant queen of jazz tap Dianne "Lady Di" Walker.

           

Gregory Hines saw the show. It was Glover's luckiest break. "I met Gregory before, at Hines and Hatchett, he'd come up there from time to time, but it wasn't till he saw me in Paris that we started working together," Glover says. "It was a beautiful experience. I worked with him till he died."

            Hines' influence still flows through Glover's taps. You can see his style take shape in old YouTube videos of the two trading eights. But the whole hoofer community seems to have taken the young prince of tap under its collective wing, Walker in particular. Glover still calls her "Aunt Dianne."

            While apprenticing at the masters' sides, Glover played himself -- an endearing, wholesome teen -- on Sesame Street. He did the Broadway run of Black and Blue.  In Jelly’s Last Jam, based on the life of Jelly Roll Morton, Glover played Young Jelly opposite Hines, who won a Tony for his role as the aging jazz piano man.

            In a video interview made years later, LeTang took credit for his discovery. "I'm so happy with Savion," he tells the camera. "He's keeping it alive. I took him when he was a kid exposed him to the older dancers like Bunny and Jimmy Slyde. I'd say Bunny, show the kid a step. Savion's got a piece of all of us."

            Most of the rhythm tap kings in whose shoes Glover now dances are gone. Lon Chaney died in '95, Green in '97, Hines in '03, LeTang last year, Jimmy Slyde last May. "My teachers were far beyond show business," Glover says. "They taught me that I wasn't a show business kind of kid. Every show I've been involved in has been by invitation on their part. I'm grateful to God that they taught me to represent an art form that belongs to my people. Being part of the family of hoofers is a blessing. I'm thankful I was able to know the cats and they let me copy them till I was ready to speak in my own voice."

           

Glover's voice emerged full-blown in '95 with Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk. Black and Blue had loads of soul, but Noise / Funk, subtitled "A Rap/Tap Discourse on the Staying Power of da' Beat," broke Broadway barriers with its young black aesthetic. Glover danced with an all-male crew of new-generation hoofers to song lyrics by poetry slam champ reg e. gaines. Noise / Funk ripped across the entire canvas of African-American street music, from the slave diaspora to hip-hop.

            Glover got slapped with a tag: hip-hop tap. He spurns the term. "I was around before the word hip-hop. I was there when it was rap, enjoying the songs and lyrics. Today it's nothing, it's a setback. There's a lot of things the kids 18 or 19 understand, but at 34 I don't get it. There is no link between hip-hop and what I do. I play music. The only links I have are to people like Hines or Lon Chaney. Those people know nothing about hip-hop. It was straight swing jazz through bebop. What I do, I can play all types of music, whether it's Caribbean or folk or jazz. I don't want kids to think that what I do has anything to do with hip-hop. No. It has to do with a very long legacy of tap dancers."

            Glover's stretched that tradition with his spiffy Gen X look and rhythmic chops. Like Noise / Funk, his 2005 tour Classical Savion (think Vivaldi, Mozart, Dvorzak) pushed the envelope. The show was controversial, netting both high praise and arched eyebrows from the press. Asked if he'd take on more classical themes in the future, Glover hesitates. "Sure, why not?" he says, after the pause.

            But the mature Glover is heading in a more relevant direction. He's picked up the bop legacy where an earlier generation of hoofers left off. Swing and bebop bands often worked with tap dancers. Like his predecessors Glover's tapped to bebop potentates -- he did an evening of works to Thelonious Monk at Lincoln Center a few years back. But he's also the world's first serious post-bop hoofer. He's got a Coltrane-inspired small-venue improv show, If Trane Wuz Here, with reg e. gaines and rising young Chicago-born composer / saxwoman Matana Roberts.

            "Coltrane's the same as dancers like Gregory Hines," Glover says. "Hines is like Miles [Davis], Miles is like Sammy Davis Jr. They're like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Ghandi. They're all the same to me 'cause of their contributions to the world. They all taught me that we can continue to evolve as artists 'till we run out of evolvement. They're transformative."

            Glover's evolution includes gigs in big city jazz clubs and concert halls with his own jazz quartet, the Otherz, or post-bop pianist McCoy Tyner and his trio. But it doesn't stop there. Like Hines, Glover plys his beats on the silver screen. He played a vaudeville minstrel in blackface in Spike Lee's bitter satire Bamboozled (2000) -- a very edgy part, but Glover's a versatile performer. Proving that fame hasn't eclipsed the good-humored kid from Sesame Street, he did the tap-over for Mumble the Penguin in Warner Brothers' 2006 animated film Happy Feet. When former New York Times arts critic John Rockwell complained that the dancer didn't get proper credit, Glover responded that he saw himself as stunt man, not star; he was just glad somebody wanted to make a movie about tap dancing.

            Like his mentors, Glover teaches at the Broadway Dance Center, formerly Hines and Hatchett. He's passing the torch to the next generation, particularly to Cartier Williams, 18, who's been Glover's protegé for a decade.

            Williams struts his stuff with Glover Saturday night, along with Marshall Davis Jr., from the original Noise / Funk cast. "Davis is a student of the late, great Steve Condos, who danced in the '30s with musicians like Benny Goodman and Count Basie," Glover says. "I really dig performing with these two dudes, they have great respect for the art form and the cats who came before us."

            There's swing, bebop and post-bop, plus Calypso and more on the Bare Soundz bill. "It displays tap as music," Glover wraps up. "That's what it is. We play grooves through tap. It's tap dance as song."

Terence Blanchard Runs the Voodoo Down

by Susan Kepecs

The Terence Blanchard Quintet brought jazz full circle (at least for this first-wave boomer) at the Union Theater last Friday night (Oct. 21). Blanchard rose to prominence in the ‘80s, plying his Crescent City-spiced trumpet with hard bop king Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers two decades after the golden days of that rousing gospel and blues-tinged flavor of bop and its edgier, more modal, post bop sister.  If Blakey and his one-time trumpet man Lee Morgan, along with Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock and Horace Silver were hard bop’s honchos, Coltrane, in his Love Supreme period, was the potentate of post bop – but the almighty Miles Davis, who played all kinds of bop and invented half of them, started it when he opened up the terrain of modal scales. Hard bop speaks to my Chicago girl soul, but post bop embodies the most daring spirit of the Big Apple ‘60s, when both of these takes on jazz (which sometimes overlap) were huge. 

That adventuous edginess has been gone for decades. A few years back Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddens quit reviewing, calling jazz an artform of the past. And in 2005, UK jazz writer Stuart Nicholson published a talked-about book titled Is Jazz Dead?  It’s true – jazz had a feeble existence once  it burned itself out on imitations of Miles' original electronic fusion sometime in the ‘70s.  The music’s quasi resurgence at the start of the new millenium -- the Africanization and hip-hopization of bop (think Lionel Loueke, Esperanza Spalding) and the soft approach to bossa nova (Gretchen Parlato, among others) is often pretty good, but except for grizzled old lions like McCoy Tyner and Roy Haynes, keepin' on into their 70s and 80s, real, honest, old-fashioned bop has been hard to come by for a very long time.

And then Blanchard blazes into town, signaling solidarity, exhorting us to “get [Walker’s] ass out!" – shades of the ‘60s! – and leaping into the void with his smokin’ young quintet: Havana-born Fabian Almazan on piano (Ben Ratliff recently called Almazan one of the country’s most interesting rising pianists: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/arts/music/four-young-pianists-on-the-rise-in-the-jazz-scene.html?scp=19&sq=ratliff&st=cse); the impressive, accomplished Brice Winston on tenor sax; 19-year old Juilliard student Joshua Crumbly on bass, and, sitting in (with no rehearsal) on drums, Jeremiah Williams.  A Blanchard-penned tune titled “Wandering Wonder” – a miracle of modal expression – started the first set; only Almazan’s brief, semi-disguised montuno hinted at anything other than ‘60s New York. 

Of course, these are versatile musicians; on the heels of “Wandering” came the bluesy, gospel-y “Ashé,” off Blanchard’s Tale of God’s Will album, the soundtrack for Spike Lee’s movie When the Levees Broke – followed by a piece of sheer post bop by Winston, “Time to Spare,” featuring Winston’s sinuous sax and Almazan’s quirky keyboard work. 

The second set opened with a soaring, sexy take on the standard “Autumn Leaves,” and an extended segment from Choices, Blanchard’s 2009 CD on Concord. I carried away from that an image of Blanchard and Winston bent over their horns, playing the same cascading runs seconds apart.
      In the closer, a new, as yet unrecorded piece by Almazan called “Pet Step Sitter’s Theme” (or something like that), the keys were souped up with electronic processing, and Blanchard’s authoritative trumpet looped through a chorus pedal. Throughout the night Blanchard, the consummate jazz educator, had served up commanding solos while leaving wide open spaces for his rising sidemen. Almazan, true to this form, broke loose in his fusion-tinged piece, which possesses a wildness akin to Bitches Brew.  And, saving the best for last, Blanchard ran the voodoo down.  

Picking Tickets for Fall, '11

    Sweet Honey in the Rock                      Dwight Carter photo

by Susan Kepecs

Since the Crash of ’08 I’ve written a lot about how the city’s culture palaces are feeling the pinch.  In the old days, I was at Overture or the Wisconsin Union Theater at least once a week, sometimes twice.  This season, again, the pickings are slimmer – but so what? Who can afford more than a handful of tickets these days?  As always, my enthusiasm runs higher for some shows than others, even among those I plan to see.  Here’s a look at my choices among the imported shows by Overture Presents and the WUT. 

My fall theater-going season starts this Friday (Oct. 7, WUT) with the unsurpassable Sweet Honey in the Rock, which hasn’t graced Madison since its 2000 concert at the old Madison Civic Center.  This week is perfect timing for the return of this national treasure – there’s no better way to get the spirit as American Autumn (Occupy Wall St.!  Recall Walker!) gears up. When these six elegant sisters raise their collective a capella voice to the heavens, spirits soar – but this music, steeped in the vocal traditions of the black church, is more political than religious.  There’s always a message in Sweet Honey’s rousing repertory of  spirituals, gospel, jazz, blues, freedom songs and African chants.  Some of these songs are old as the hills; others, penned by group members, speak truth to new excesses of power.  Sweet Honey’s been twining rich four and five-part harmonies around their demands for justice and equality for nearly 40 years, and they do it with wide-open heart and soul.

My final fall pick, calendar-wise, is Mad City fave Dobet Gnahore (Nov. 11, the Sett, Union South).  Since her first visit to Madison with Putumayo’s Acoustic Africa show in the fall of ’06, we’ve watched this Ivorian chanteuse / dancer go from rising star to the top of Afropop.  A new-generation pan-African idealist, Gnahore guards the continent’s culture from the jaws of global commercial forces.  Unlike older, hard rock-influenced Afropop gods or Africa’s hip hop youth she sticks to the roots. She’s a sizzling songstress; she dances pan-African freestyle like liquid fire.  She’s a goddess of Afrochic.  She grooves.  

Gnahore smokes; Madeleine Peyroux (WUT, Oct. 12) is cool. The Athens, Georga-born chanteuse, who started busking on European streets as a teen, was the ticketed headliner for the Isthmus Jazz Festival four years ago. She’s traveled new ground since then.  Her spare alto voice still sounds a lot like Billie Holiday sans pain, though unlike Holiday Peyroux plays a guitar, and her repertory often strays far afield from bluesy jazz – she’s covered Patsy Cline, Bob Dylan, lots of Leonard Cohen.  Lately, Peyroux’s been writing (or co-writing) her own songs.  Most of them swing, and her words wink.

        My jones for old-fashioned jazz gets fed when multitalented trumpeter / bandleader / composer / film score master and four-time Grammy winner Terence Blanchard, long a leading lion of straight-ahead, takes the WUT stage with his quintet on Oct. 21. Blanchard, a New Orleans native, emerged as a leader in the ‘80s during his stint with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.  Through Blanchard, the flames of hard bop and Miles-style fusion burn on, sizzling with Crescent City pizzazz.  Amen to that!  But Blanchard’s no relic of bygone eras. An educator who works with some amazing young musicians, he keeps his sound current with the intense global colors – mostly African, though his forthcoming album with conga king Poncho Sanchez, Chano y Dizzy, is pure Cubop – that mark the burgeoning new jazz of the twenty-first century generation.

        By way of contrast, rising young jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire – a former Blanchard student – plays Overture’s Capitol Theater (Oct. 11) with “The Miles Davis Experience,” a commercial, pre-packaged affair from Blue Note Records, CAMI Music and Miles Davis Properties, LLC.  The show concentrates on Miles’ works from 1959 through 1969, which would include just about all of his best albums, from Kind of Blue through In a Silent Way, while seeming to stop a few months prior to the 1970 release of Bitches’ Brew, his seminal fusion album. With or without Bitches Brew this is some of the best repertory in jazz, and Akinmusire’s gotta be good – he won the Thelonius Monk International Jazz Competition in 2007, and he gets rave reviews.  I’d love to hear him play, but this is one of those history channel packages, filled with film clips and other epoch-related relics and aimed at rescuing the twentieth century for the twenty-first.  Shows like this have their place, but they tend to make me gnash my teeth.  I might go, if I’m in the mood.  But if you just want to hear living jazz, rooted in Miles’ legacy and moving into the future on its own, choose Blanchard instead.

        Dance gets the short shrift in the theaters this fall – there’s not a lot, but virtuoso hoofer Savion Glover (Nov. 10, WUT) is a best bet.  Last time Glover was here, in November, ’08, he plied his renowned rhythm taps on Bare Soundz, a show with a rangy set of African diaspora beats.  Bare Soundz was brilliantly sophisticated, and Glover, who’s paid homage to monumental musicians from Monk and Coltrane to Bach and Bartok, is still pushing the envelope with those fortunate feet. This time he’s touring Classical Encounter, a show so brand-new there are no reviews yet – I don’t know what’s in it, but you’re bound to be blown away.

        Ballet Maribor’s Radio and Juliet (Overture Hall, Oct. 15) is on my maybe list. The company, from the eponymous Slovenian city, doesn’t have much of an English-language online presence, other than a couple of positive reviews of this full-length work, which was performed at Pittsburgh’s International Festival of Firsts in ’08 and again at Jacob’s Pillow the following year.  But from YouTube clips it’s clear that Radio and Juliet, choreograhed by the company’s artistic director, Edward Clug, looks a lot like the work of Czech choreographer Jiri Kylian of Nederlands Dans Theatre, whose pieces are also prominent in the repertory of Chicago’s Hubbard St. Dance.  I’m not a huge fan of Kylian’s work, but I’m a sucker for clean, contemporary ballet technique, and I’ve never seen Ballet Maribor, so you might find me there. 

That’s it for me this fall -- what are you planning to see?  

 Broke or not, I’ve got my eye on more tickets for spring.  Stay tuned.