Dancer- singer Hines visits town to perform with friend Stripling

Maurice Hines is anticipating four euphoric performances with the Columbus Jazz Orchestra starting Thursday — except for one pesky detail.

“The only problem I have with Byron Stripling is that he has just too much charisma,” the 74-year-old tap dancer, actor and singer said of the CJO’s artistic director. “I don’t like when he’s onstage with me.”

The statement sounds harsh, until Hines finishes it with a chuckle.

After 30 years of friendship, he’s allowed to tease.

Especially because Stripling owes him an eternal favor.

“One of the most important and profound things he did was he introduced me to a dancer named Alexis Wilson,” Stripling said. “He What: "Fascinating Rhythm" with Maurice Hines and the Columbus Jazz Orchestra Where: Southern Theatre, 21 E. Main St. Contact: 614-294-5200, www.jazzartsgroup.org Showtime: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday Tickets: $18.50 to $71.50 said, ‘You have to meet.’ I refused. I wasn’t into dating.”

Wilson and Stripling eventually married and now have two daughters.

Stripling met Hines in 1987 while auditioning for the Louis Armstrong tribute show “Satchmo,” but his connection to the showman began two decades earlier.

“When we watched TV as kids, there weren’t a lot of black performers, and when there were, my parents would make note of it,” Stripling, 57, said. “People would come on like Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole, mostly on 'The Tonight Show.'”

One of the most frequent late-night acts was “Hines, Hines and Dad,” featuring the tap-dancing brother duo of Maurice and Gregory Hines, with their father (also named Maurice) on drums.

So when Stripling stepped into the “Satchmo” audition room and met Hines for the first time, he barely kept it together.

“I almost fainted,” Stripling said.

Hines counseled Stripling on stage presence and performance technique, lessons he gleaned from sharing stages with Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Lena Horne.

He and Gregory, who died in 2003, once danced with Judy Garland at a show in New Haven, Connecticut. She gave them a kiss on the cheek and told them to call her Judy, because she was “just a singer, that’s all I do.”

As they became famous, the Hines brothers adopted her mantra with starstruck proteges.

“(We) said, ‘We’re just tap dancers like you, sweetheart. We have to pay our rent ... Don’t let the titles fool you.’”

Hines’ modesty is impressive but it doesn’t negate his resume, which includes a Tony Award nomination for best actor in a musical, directing the Radio City Spectacular and teaching ballet and jazz classes in New York City and Los Angeles.

Hines has also released two albums of jazz standards, which he’ll pull from during the CJO shows.

Certainly, Hinessaid, good songwriters are at work