Glover taps drumming friends for SFJazz jams
Through his astonishing work on Broadway stages, Hollywood films, concert halls and classrooms, Savion Glover has propelled tap to the center of American culture.
A direct link to the masters who brought the bipedal art form to national consciousness in the 1930s and ’40s, he’s forged new avenues for what he calls “hoofing.” Continuing to evolve as a choreographer, he’s created dazzling steps for projects like the animated “Happy Feet” films and Broadway hits, like “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” and disappointments, like last year’s collaboration with George C. Wolfe, “Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.”
But he’s at his most freewheeling and unfettered in rhythmic dialogue with fellow maestros of percussion, who recognize Glover as a kindred spirit. Bestowing the ultimate jazz
praise, drummer and pianist Jack DeJohnette declares that “he’s the John Coltrane of tap as far as I’m concerned.”
They’ve collaborated numerous times over the years, and DeJohnette joins forces with Glover again for the second half of the tap star’s four-night run at SFJazz, Thursday, Jan. 4, through Sunday, Jan. 7. “I first played with Savion about 30 years ago, with Ron Carter and Geri Allen, when he was about 16,” says DeJohnette, 75. “After that I started doing these residencies with him at the Blue Note. We spent a year and a half, me with a trio and him with Marshall Davis, all of us coming together and improvising.”
Glover calls these sessions “dance jams,” and he collected a quartet of the Blue Note performances with NEA Jazz Masters on his 2012 DVD “Fours” (Half Note Records), which features his thrilling terpsichorean encounters with pianists Eddie Palmieri and McCoy Tyner and drummers DeJohnette and Roy Haynes.
All of the jams are riveting, and it’s no knock on the famed pianists to note that connections between drummers and hoofers run especially deep. Haynes, still a creative force at 92, is a fine hoofer himself, and at the 2012 NEA Jazz Masters Awards Ceremony he and DeJohnette broke into a tap routine that’s been viewed thousands of times on YouTube.
“Roy very much looked the tap dancer, tapping the way he plays drums,” DeJohnette says with a chuckle. “Me, not so much, but I played for tap dancers and shake dancers in Chicago at dances and shows when I was coming up.”
For Glover, hoofing isn’t so much a style, practice or tradition as a creative portal. He absorbed knowledge directly from formative figures such as Jimmy Slyde, Henry LeTang, Honi Coles, Sammy Davis Jr. and Gregory Hines, knowledge he seeks to pass on at his HooFeRzClub School for Tap in Newark, N.J., where he was born and raised. Like many of the greatest jazz artists, he considers himself a work in progress, eager to soak up new information, and prefers not to talk about the particular sonic characteristics that unite tap shoes and trap drums.
“It’s all sound,” says Glover, 44. “How we get the sound out, whatever that sound or vibration turns into, it’s all the same. I’m at a point in my life where these categories are starting to not make much sense. I’m a man of the world. I think for me to put a cap on these inventions or talents are a disservice. I feel that Jack DeJohnette is a legend and contributor. I’m just honored and happy to be able to learn and share. That’s what it’s about.”
Glover’s rhythmic partner for the first half of his SFJazz run is part of the hoofer family by both blood and practice. One of jazz’s best young drummers, Marcus Gilmore has performed in the Bay Area in recent years with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, saxophonist Steve Coleman, and pianist Vijay Iyer (with whom he returns to SFJazz on Jan. 19-20). He’s also the grandson of Roy Haynes, and he grew up watching Glover up close.
As a child, he longed for a pair of tap shoes that never showed up under the Christmas tree, but he “never lost the affinity for that part of the culture,” says Gilmore, 31. “I’d see Savion perform, usually with my grandfather, and we ended up doing this duo series. It’s a conversation. I have a bunch of sensors with me, and I can trigger samples from something we just played.”
Sonic explorers like Gilmore and DeJohnette offer Glover the opportunity to stretch his imagination, to the point where his beat “can be a flute, a heart, a harmonica or drums,” he says. “I imagine they’re hearing words and tones, and the relationship is that we’re both in the state of imagination as we approach the sound.”