What the Eye Hears Read online

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  OPENING ACT

  On a Sunday afternoon at the beginning of this century, if you walked by a certain small club in midtown Manhattan, you would hear tap dancing. And if you went inside, you might discover, as the source of that sound, a man nearly ninety years old. Snug in a stylish suit, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his bony chest, he tapped out rhythms that swung hard. Age might have robbed him of the elasticity to perform the scissoring kicks and jive splits he’d been whipping off less than twenty years before, but he had learned to execute his steps with minimal effort. As long as he was dancing, he was buoyant, indefatigable, still moving with the speed of youth, and prone to revolving his hips like a stripper. Then suddenly he would stop, flatly declare he was tired, and break the spell, deflating into a fragile old man who had to be helped offstage. The transformation was poignant. He made it a joke. “I’m sure happy to be here,” he would say. “At my age, I’m happy to be anywhere.”

  His name was Buster Brown, and this was his Crazy Tap Jam. Squinting, he would scan the tables of Swing 46 for a dancer ready to perform, asking in his high, throaty voice, “Who’s got their shoes on?” In response, Frankie Clemente, a four-year-old with a buzz cut, might escape his family, slide into the raised stage with a thud, and scramble over the lip. “Lay it on me,” Buster would say, and Frankie, stamping his feet arhymthmically, would swing his arms and spin and stand on his toes in rough approximations of steps he’d seen older dancers do. The control that Buster was slowly losing, Frankie had yet to acquire. If Buster’s dancing was spare and suggestive like Chinese painting, Frankie’s was coloring outside the lines. People cheered for both.

  The more they applauded, the more difficult it became to convince Frankie to surrender the stage. Whichever moves provoked the loudest response, those he would shamelessly repeat. Otherwise, his movements appeared random, as did the occasions when he stumbled upon a coherent rhythm. Then his body seemed to express a different satisfaction. When he first started dancing at Swing 46, Frankie was two, and he clearly apprehended the joy of making noise. But at four, perhaps he also felt an intimation of the subtler pleasure of making music.

  As haphazard as Frankie’s attempts seemed, they aimed toward the models he witnessed each week. He swung his arms while he stamped his feet, because he realized that both were part of the game. His actions suggested an understanding of a defining feature of tap dance: that it falls between categories, or across them; that it is dance and music, sound and movement. Tap makes music visible, matching aural patterns with shapes in space. You can watch a film of a dancer like Buster Brown, turn the volume off, and still nearly hear the beats. It’s music for the deaf. Yet tap also makes movement audible. Close your eyes and you can almost see weight shifting. Call it dance for the blind.

  Most dance arises from an interaction between music and movement. But because tap can be both dancing to music and dancing as music, it’s especially concerned with the combination. As the tap dancer Paul Draper once explained, “What the eye sees is sharpened by what the ear hears, and the ear hears more clearly that which sight enhances.” A dancer jumps up at a tilt with bent knees, shaping his legs into a bell; when, still in the air, he brings his heels together, that bell rings. The motion that propels a trainlike step is what makes it sound like a train. The relation can be that blatant, but also highly subtle, as in the minute calibrations of force and weight with which a heel is dropped. There’s also pleasure in not seeing the sound, in not being able to discern the source. At top speeds, a tap dancer can articulate a dozen or more discrete sounds per second. You hear a flurry of beats and can’t account for them all—something has been slipped in, a bonus. It’s sleight of hand, made by foot.

  In practice, dancers tend to lean toward one pole or the other, emphasizing sound over movement or the reverse. The two are in tension, one often working at the bidding, or the expense, of the other. The pursuit of rhythmic intricacy and gradations of timbre pools action in the feet, so that tap dance becomes a standing drum solo in a jazz club where your view of the dancer is partial, or an audio recording in which you can’t see the dancer at all. Or the dancer’s attention moves to figures in space, to body parts upon which we’re more accustomed to reading emotion, and to gestures, which, however eloquent, make no sound.

  To put it another way, all music begins in movement: hands on keys, breath on reeds. But a musician dances incidentally—twisting to reach for a note, keeping the beat—while for a tap dancer, the motions that make the music are to be developed for their own sake. This fact locates tap between the potential abstraction of music and the unavoidable humanity of dance, in which the instrument is the body, the person. Tap similarly falls between two sides in the centuries-old debate about what dance should be, a form of storytelling or a nonrepresentational art. As music, tap has access to pure form. And yet, in its most popular manifestations, tap has been all about personality. It has been situated, not always comfortably, in narrative genres such as musical comedy. Tap can be comic, with comedy as physical as a clown’s, but here, too, it is most distinctive in musical interplay, in the wit of how a rhythm is parceled out across parts of the feet.

  I have one more theory about tap’s appeal. Perhaps the most powerful part of our response to any kind of dance is kinesthetic: the way we seem to feel in our own muscles and bones what we see in the muscles and bones of the bodies we’re watching. Tap combines this with what I think of as the kinesthetics of hearing: the way that hearing is a kind of touch, blasts of air knocking against the eardrum. We sense this most obviously in low, rumbling frequencies—in music that you feel, rolling through you like thunder—but it’s operating all the time. Add to that our primal reaction to rhythm, and tap dancers have a potent set of kinesthetic responses to work upon.

  In any case, Frankie Clemente’s banging pointed toward the ideal, the dynamic equilibrium of sound and motion, just as his habit of making things up on the spot served as a crude version of improvisation. He was, after all, participating in a jam session in the jazz tradition, what Ralph Ellison famously called “the jazzman’s true academy,” a site of “apprenticeship, ordeals, initiation ceremonies,” where the musician must “achieve, in short, his self-determined identity.” That’s a lofty description of what went down at Swing 46, but most dancers there fulfilled the tacit expectation that they test themselves in the moment. For many, improvising was an excuse to shirk the effort of putting together a routine. Yet for more serious dancers, improvising could be the harder road—requiring both a lightning-quick, fertile imagination and the technique to realize their ideas without hesitation. In a sense, the goal of improvisation is unreachable: to take the shock of invention and make it constant. Nevertheless, for jazz musicians, including the tap dancing kind, it’s the ultimate measure of prowess.

  Pure improvisation is rare, of course. Like other jazz musicians, like artists of all kind
s, tap dancers develop habits, cling to pet maneuvers, vary formulas. Somewhere in those tendencies, just shy of mannerism, lies style: a musician’s individual way of phrasing a rhythm, a dancer’s unique interpretation of a step expressed through the equally unique instrument of his body, the movements he adopts and the ones he fashions and how he puts them together. Style: always some mixture of strengths accentuated and weaknesses disguised, of weaknesses converted into strengths, always some amalgam of artifice and what comes naturally, of dogged practice and of grace—that gift from who knows where. Through improvising, dancers both discover and create themselves, commonly in public.

  If Frankie had the desire and discipline to follow the tradition honored at Swing 46, he might move through imitation to his own style. The high value tap dancers place on individuation helps explain why, even though what they do is seldom narrative, they like to call it “story dancing.” Each time Buster danced, he was telling us who he was, what he had to say. And when he was improvising, that story, and hence that self, was open-ended. Perhaps that is why, within the partly self-determined limits of style, tap dancers so often claim to feel free. That kind of freedom is earned.

  * * *

  When I started attending Buster’s jams, the first thing that surprised me was the variety of participants—four-year-olds and octogenarians, men and women, blacks and whites. In that room, tap cut across many of the lines that divide Americans. And not only Americans. Swing 46 regulars came from Europe, Asia, South America, Australia. What drew these people together?

  Gregory Hines had an answer. “There are no judgments in tap,” I would later hear him say. “Put on a pair of tap shoes and you’re in.” That last sentence could have been posted as the entry requirement at Swing 46. The inclusive policy attracted an eclectic assortment of types and styles—flirtatious, belligerent, sophisticated, goofy. The open invitation also blurred another dividing line, the one between amateur and professional. It wasn’t uncommon for a total beginner to be followed by a vaudeville veteran, or for a fiercely dedicated yet talentless enthusiast to share the stage with a prodigiously gifted yet cavalier wunderkind. The mix was absurd, exasperating, and, if you were open to the spirit of it, fun.

  It could, however, be difficult to take seriously. There’s a reason that when people say someone is “tap-dancing around” a subject, they mean that the figurative tap dancer is all flash and little substance. In the popular imagination, tap has long been associated with amateurs. In movie musicals from the 1930s, some ingenue from the sticks, suitcase in hand, fills in at the last moment for an experienced professional, parlaying a few tap steps into instant fame. The most popular tap dancing star of that era—the apogee of tap’s popularity—was a child: Shirley Temple. Aspiring Shirleys stocked a thousand dancing schools, and even today, tap’s most common image remains that of a horde of prepubescent girls with pasted-on smiles in a recital that only a parent could bear.

  Even the best tap dancers deflect serious appraisal. Racial attitudes figure in—primitivist notions of “natural” rhythm. Closely related and even more instrumental is the way that great tap dancers work very hard to create an illusion of ease and the impression that even when they’re not improvising they’re making things up in the moment. The strongest appeal of tap dancers can be the way they make you feel that they’re not doing much—that you could do what they’re doing, if you only tried—and, at the same time, that they’re accomplishing nearly impossible feats, things you could never do. “If you can walk, you can tap,” Buster liked to say, which is about as true as saying that if you can cry out you can sing. Anyone who’s walked to a rhythm or drummed one with his toes has tap-danced, but only in the most elementary sense. Buster’s comment, a motto among his colleagues, might invite a dismissal of tap as no more a discipline than Frankie Clemente’s flopping around. Buster said it because his sense of theatrical etiquette was centered in such distance-diminishing gestures. Also, after eighty-some years of doing it, tap dancing for Buster was like walking.

  A Sunday session at Swing 46 felt like a family picnic because that was how Buster wanted it. Though he would consistently forget names or mangle them, he seemed to know everybody who came in. And if he didn’t know you, he would soon. “Have you got your shoes?” he’d ask, encouraging anyone who wanted to dance, making sure no one was left out. Soon enough, Buster had me choosing a song and taking off into the unknown. And so it was that Brian Seibert, a bespectacled white guy in khakis and a button-down shirt, entered the Swing 46 mix. As I hopped onstage, Buster announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Duane!”

  * * *

  Buster would ask a new dancer to tell a bit about himself. Here’s a bit about me and tap. I’ve danced all my life, formally and informally. I took my first class in 1981, when I was six, at a dance studio in a suburb of Los Angeles. It was a studio similar to thousands of others across the country. My teacher was Miss Thea, an archetypal small-time dance instructor: fishnet stockings, a cane in one hand, a cigarette dangling from the other. I had been playing soccer and was lousy at it; my mother figured that dance classes might improve my coordination. My sister was already attending Miss Thea’s, and so, like almost every other American male dancer with a sister, I followed mine into class.

  Soon enough, I dropped soccer in favor of dance, even though (or because) I was usually the only boy. I graduated to another studio, where I took tap along with ballet and something misleadingly named “jazz dance.” (“Broadway dance” or “music video” dance would’ve been more accurate.) By my studio’s standards, I was advanced; my classmates were professional adults. But compared with the tap I would encounter in Buster, the tap I acquired as a child was like a signal that had lost strength by straying too far from its source. The tap I learned was the kind taught in most dancing schools: simplified, standardized. I felt the relation between the rhythms of the routines and the sounds from the stereo, but I don’t think I ever conceived of what I was doing as playing music. I associated tap with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. They were hard to miss: you flipped a channel and there they were, dancing on the ceiling, trading steps with a cartoon mouse. Later, I saw Gregory Hines tap in the film White Nights and was more enchanted by Mikhail Baryshnikov and his eleven pirouettes. Buster and his dancing came from a world I knew little about as a child. I knew little about it as an adult, even though I was an avid jazz fan, and Buster had performed with musicians I held in great esteem. For someone who thought of himself—at least some of the time—as a tap dancer, there was a lot I didn’t know.

  * * *

  Take Buster, for example. He was born in Baltimore, in 1913. His father shucked oysters. His mother was a maid. With seven sisters and no brothers, he was always the star. Though his given name was James, his aunt once remarked that he seemed “just like a little Buster”—a reference perhaps to the mischievous comic-book character—and the name stuck. When Buster was six, his father died, and he was brought up not only by his mother but by his sisters, who took jobs after school to keep the family afloat.

  “I started to dance,” Buster liked to say, “when I started to walk.” By the time he was five, his favorite activity was attending vaudeville shows. He fell in love with the comedians first and didn’t notice the dancers much until junior high, when a troupe called the Whitman Sisters came through town. On the bill was Pops Whitman, a dancer a few years younger than Buster: “He was a little guy that could really dance. He could do everything. A no-hand flip like nobody in the world. That and the way that he was dressed. He had on long pants. I wasn’t even wearing long pants then. He was wearing long pants and this man’s suit. Fit him perfectly. I knew right then this is what I wanted to do.”

  Buster and his friends taught themselves. “We would look at a step,” he said, “and we’d spend some time learning it from the guy who did the step. This is what we called trading. There was no problem getting a guy to teach you a step, because he would be learning a step from you.” They practiced on the
street, in the schoolyard, down in the basement. When acts came through town—and in those days, acts were always coming through—Buster and his friends would study the dancing until they could imitate it. “You didn’t need to go to no school and learn how to dance if you wanted to do a little stealing.” Trading, stealing—there wasn’t much difference, at least among friends.

  Each year, the students at Frederick Douglass High School put on a show. Buster and two of his buddies danced as the Three Little Dots. At night, the boys would sneak out to clubs and dance for coins. “Good money,” he remembered. “We thought four and five dollars a night was good money then.” Compared with what his mother made, it was. Dancing wasn’t like doing laundry; it was “easy living. You could do what you loved and get paid for it.”

  In 1932, Buster went pro. Tap was everywhere—vaudeville theaters, nightclubs, movie screens. If that meant that opportunity abounded, it also meant that competition was keen. Buster and the gang called themselves the Three Aces now, and their style emphasized speed. Even their soft shoe, a dance usually taken at a relaxed tempo, was sped up. An emcee at Baltimore’s Plantation Club suggested they change their name to the Speed Kings. (This was not just an improvement in specificity; people had been mishearing Aces as Asses.) A touring show took the boys to Columbus, Cleveland, Philadelphia; another show carried them home. They modeled themselves after the trio of Pete, Peaches, and Duke, one of the most influential groups in the “class act” tradition. “We had tried to imitate them,” Buster remembered, “but we had never seen them.” (That’s some fancy step stealing.) Once, when the Speed Kings were playing in the same town as their idols, Buster finally caught their act. “Everything they did was together. And they were the best-dressed tap dancing act ever.” By comparison, the Speed Kings were average, similar in approach and execution to dozens of tap teams.