Classical Savion
at the Joyce Theater,
New York, January 2005.
In the Thirties and Forties, when tap dancers were ubiquitous on Broadway and nightclub and vaudeville stages, even the greatest tap acts were seldom allowed more than eight consecutive minutes. And so it was a measure of historical change, a look-how-far-we-have-come moment, when Savion Glover, in his January performances at New York’s Joyce Theater, tapped through each two-hour show, almost uninterrupted, all by himself.
Or not quite by himself, since he was accompanied by his regular, four-piece jazz band, The Otherz, as well as by some new friends—a ten-piece chamber orchestra, composed of young conservatory graduates and conducted by Robert Sadin. The presence of the orchestra was also an indicator of change. The performances, titled Classical Savion, marked Glover’s first attempt to apply his improvisational brilliance to a program of classical music, tapping to Vivaldi, Bach, Bartok, Mendelssohn, and Piazzolla. The reviews were ecstatic: “tremendous,” “an experimental triumph,” “a revelation for eye and ear alike.”
As many of those reviews mentioned, Glover isn’t the first tap dancer to have a go at the classical repertory. His most famous predecessor in this regard was Paul Draper, a graceful, gentlemanly dancer who, in his day, inspired in reviewers the kinds of superlatives Glover does now. Son of Muriel Draper, blueblood hostess of intellectual and social salons, Draper initially pursued tap dancing as an easy way out, a kind of slumming. Later, he got serious and systematic, and from the early 1940s until their careers were scuttled in 1949 by McCarthy-era blacklisting, he and harmonica player Larry Adler found great success as the “fair-haired boys of the concert industry,” selling out concert houses across America and Europe—some seventy recitals a year —performing works by Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, and others.
In the years since, dozens of tap dancers have followed Draper’s lead. One closer to Glover was Leon Collins, a hoofer who learned to tap on the street corners of Chicago’s South Side, had his own successful career in the Forties and Fifties performing with big bands, and found himself reupholstering cars for fourteen years after the work dried up in the Sixties. During the tap renaissance of the early Eighties, Collins discovered that the even rhythms and symmetrical patterns of his jazz style synched up easily with Bach preludes and fugues and that his bebop-derived speed prepared him well for “The Flight of the Bumblebee.” He probably also realized, as Draper had, that classical pieces provided something that jazz—especially after bebop and its independent drummers—didn’t: very little percussive competition. Although Collins died in 1985, too soon to have much of a direct influence on Glover, the young dancer is certainly aware of the precedent.
The most common interaction between tap dancers and the classical music world, however, has been for symphony orchestras to program Morton Gould’s 1952 “Tap Dance Concerto” as a novelty or pops piece. Glover considered using it for Classical Savion before rejecting it as corny. Most dancers find the concerto rhythmically dull, but it helps broaden the perception of tap’s possibilities and it serves as a ticket for tap dancers to some of the prestige that orchestras and written scores still hold. As Gould emphasized to the Herald-Tribune in 1955, the concerto dancer, developing the musical theme as the score directs, doesn’t perform spontaneously: “the important point is that this isn’t hoofing.”
Yet hoofing is, proudly, what Savion Glover always does, and it’s what he did during Classical Savion. Where Draper matched classical music with a classical dancing style he derived from ballet, Glover stuck to the style he’s derived from the jazz tap tradition—more aural than visual, grounded, relaxed, a little ungainly. And he was performing spontaneously, improvising. When jazz standard-bearer Wynton Marsalis records a Classic Wynton album, as he has, the trumpeter can simply play what Vivaldi wrote for his instrument. Glover, as standard-bearer for tap, doesn’t have that option. Instead, he has the freedom, and the burden, of finding a place for himself in the music, doubling its notes or creating notes of his own.
This takes some adjustment. Glover is a virtuoso, a marvel, so it was no surprise that the first showings of Classical Savion were full of wonders. With only two one-minute breaks during which Glover exchanged one sweat-soaked shirt for another that wouldn’t be dry for long, each performance was a feat of stamina (a feat repeated eight times a week, for three weeks). But the achievement was more than athletic. Glover’s rhythmic inventions—now strident and forceful, now murmuring and reflective—were shot through with radiance and warmed by a playful wit that was sometimes musical (ending a phrase with a surprise), sometimes physical (following a diminuendo up onto his tippy-toes), and often both.
At the same time, though, Glover didn’t seem quite at home. Frequently, he appeared to be falling back on familiar steps, and the familiar rhythms that go with them, dropping funk beat after funk beat, for example, into Vivaldi’s “Winter.” I found this not just anachronistic or stylistically unorthodox, but unconvincing. That word could also be applied to Glover’s take on Bach’s familiar “Air on a G String.” Pulling down some tapless shoes resting on the piano next to a photo of the late Gregory Hines, then pouring sand into a box on the stage, he started a sand dance—a tradition older than tap, one at its very roots—and turned the number into an elegy for his mentor and father-figure. The trouble was that the sand dance technique Glover displayed was too minimal, either by design or lack of ability, to convey much of anything.
The other problem came in the finale, when the jazz band came on and Glover generously introduced each of the musicians and had each, classical and jazz alike, take a turn improvising. The classical musicians were game but struggled. Although Glover treated their improvisations with respect (too much respect—this section went on forever), I couldn’t help but wonder if he was trying to level the playing field. The contrast between what they did and what Glover and the jazz players did was obvious, as obvious as the contrast between what Glover did with the chamber orchestra and what he did with his band, jamming at the end on a Coltrane-inspired groove. In an after-performance Q&A, Glover described that last contrast well: playing with the band was “like talking to your best friend”; playing with the orchestra was “like talking to the principal.”
“My approach,” Glover told the New York Times, “is a fresh energy, an attempt to conquer this music through the dance.” This is part of a larger project. “I’m on a mission,” he told talk show host Charlie Rose a few years ago. “Tap should be respected. Like opera at Carnegie Hall.” Glover wants cultural prestige, and he wants it on his own terms. Critics used to praise Draper for “elevating” a lowly field, for “raising” tap dancing to a classic art, suggesting that because he was a musician, the term “tap dancer” couldn’t accurately apply to him. John Martin, chief critic of the Times, made much of the way Draper had “chosen tap as a medium for art rather than hoofing.” Glover wants to collapse that distinction.
Since pretension and snobbery are his targets, Glover mocks them. Hence the outfit for Classical Savion—a tuxedo with shirt unbuttoned at collar and cuff, bowtie hanging loose. And hence the way he sometimes set his jaw stiff and wiggled his head pompously or the way he made a production of beginning one number in a sloppy approximation of ballet’s third position. Gregory Hines used to do this, too, tossing a turn in attitude into a swinging improvisation. The joke was the same: “Isn’t it funny? You see, I’m dancing.”
Such games are disarming. They’re also defensive and childish. Glover’s bid to be taken seriously wasn’t helped, either, by the fawning speeches Sadin the conductor felt compelled to give during each performance, assuring us that he had never seen a musician who learned as fast as Glover did, that he had never met anyone with such an acute ear and memory, that Glover was “bringing back what classical music was supposed to be.” It all sounded like special pleading.
And it was all unnecessary. The later performances of Classical Savion made the earlier ones look like rehearsals—which, essentially, they were. By the end of the run, Glover actually had internalized the deep sense of compositional form that Sadin was claiming he had mastered from the beginning. The structure of each selection was clearer, the transitions more distinct—and not just rhythmically, but melodically, thematically. Sadin’s claims no longer seemed so far-fetched. Who knew that it would take a tap dancer to rescue “The Four Seasons” from its coffeehouse Muzak status, to restore its lusty physicality, its violence? I doubt that Glover knew anything about the work’s programmatic origins, but he heard something in the “hunt” section that made him stalk about the stage. In the Q&A, Glover spoke of how, when Sadin introduced him to the music, it sounded new to him. Glover made it sound that way to us.
What’s more, he found a way to make it sound like him. In the later performances, the anachronistic syncopations and out-of-place funk figures were still there, but Glover had found where they fit. And the music had changed him, too. One of his favorite swing figures, usually accompanied by some hep-cat finger-snapping, grew tighter, more martial, became something else in response to Vivaldi.
Along the way, most of the kinks were worked out. The finale still went on too long, but the young conservatory musicians got into the spirit, finding a way to express themselves during their featured improvisations by playing “Twinkle, Twinkle” in a clashing key, by coaxing non-traditional sounds from their instruments, by quoting cell phone rings or the theme from Star Wars. And during the elegy for Hines, Glover wisely replaced the sand dance with lovely old soft shoe. Here you could see all the ways his performing has matured recently—the confidence to be simple, the uningratiating way he’s discovered of sharing not just his anger but an unmistakable, totally infectious joy in dancing. Showing that anger was a great accomplishment for a black tap dancer; finding the joy again is no less an achievement. Glover smiles now, but he doesn’t have to.
Over the years, Glover has gotten a lot of flak for not looking at the audience. He made a point during the Q&A of explaining that he can’t help it, offering the best explanation I’ve ever heard: “music draws me away from the audience.” If that was clearer than usual during Classical Savion, the reason is that there were more musicians for Glover to get close to, arranged in a semi-circle behind him on the stage. But there was another reason Glover had his back to us—the same reason Sadin faced away. For long sections, Sadin relinquished his post and let Glover conduct with his feet. Glover does this all the time with his jazz band, signaling how he wants them to play. Yet it means something different to conduct a chamber orchestra, and that was part of the message of the show.
Paul Draper probably would not have liked Classical Savion. He would surely have complained about Glover’s disregard of the upper body, but then Draper’s solution (grafting classical port de bras onto chattering feet) didn’t always work, either. He might have dismissed Glover’s art, as he did the work of Glover’s hoofing predecessors, as entertainment, not serious dancing. But maybe if he listened more closely, he would have recognized that the accomplishment he most valued in himself —working all the tricks out of his system, becoming a real artist—is Glover’s too. And that when he said that hoofing couldn’t go anywhere, he was wrong.
The classical music world may never provide the ideal forum for Glover but the experiment stretches him, and us, and tap dancing, and that’s all good. The description of Classical Savion that he gave to the Times was apt: “It’s about this solo dancer needing this music…needing to challenge this music.” It was about both, and maybe about this music—this culture—needing the challenge of this solo dancer.
Brian Seibert writes regularly for the Village Voice and The New Yorker. He is working on a history of tap dance.
