By Lisa Traiger
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, April 15, 2005
LIKE A VIOLINIST tuning the strings of an instrument, Savion Glover tunes the taps on his shoes -- with exacting precision. In fact, Glover doesn't go anywhere without a screwdriver to tighten his Teletones, the aluminum metal plates attached to the heels and toes of his Capezio K260s, the tap phenom's shoe of choice.
"It's a matter of tonality" is how he explains his propensity for tight taps. "We have jingle taps, bumper taps and now we have these one-screw taps, but they're not going to get you better sounds." Glover is old school. He wants his sounds to ring clear and true. Teletone, his choice, has been around nearly as long as Capezio, the venerable dance shoemaker -- more than 100 years. "But now if you tell the kids that [those loose taps] give you a clanky sound, they don't care. They think having a loose tap is fresh."
Glover, the child tap prodigy all grown up, knows better. He learned at the feet of masters, like Howard "Sandman" Sims, who gave him that tip about always keeping a screwdriver around. "I personally like my taps really tight, so I know there is no extra sound," Glover says. "I'm the only one making the sound."
Sunday, when Glover performs his two-act "Improvography II" at the recently opened Music Center at Strathmore, acoustics will play an integral role in a concert hall already known for its exacting level of sound fidelity. And tight taps will let Glover's feet talk and sing to the accompaniment of his four-piece band, the Otherz. Just 31, Glover is a classic tap dancer, more interested in what his dance sounds like than what it looks like. But make no mistake: When he hunkers down, hunched over, his head cocked ever so slightly as if listening to a distant call only he can hear, Glover parses out syncopations with a speed and dexterity close to phenomenal. For him, it's all in the beat, the rhythm and the syncopation -- the hoof.
Gregory Hines, himself no slouch in the field, once called Glover "the greatest tap dancer ever to lace up a pair of Capezios or any other tap shoes." For a gauge of how important Hines -- who died in 2003 -- was to Glover, you have only to look at the name of his 35-city, eight-week tour. "[The word 'improvography'] was introduced to me by Gregory Hines, who came up with it to describe his experiences with choreography. He [was] an improvisationalist and we as hoofers are, of course, improvisational artists. The concept is about not being locked into doing the same thing."
In that vein, Glover, who made his Broadway debut as the star of "The Tap Dance Kid" at 10 and earned a Tony Award for his choreography in the trenchant panorama of African American history told through dance, "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk," is returning to his Broadway roots: song and dance. Glover notes about his repertory of jazz standards, "I've always sung . . . but I guess it's a matter of growth and age and where I am in my life right now. I sing stuff that I grew up on, basically the jazz music and the rhythms that I hear -- people like Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra." The free-form nature of the program means there's no telling what his 40-minute set might include on Sunday, but he's sure of some classic jazz, with perhaps a touch of R&B, rock or funk shuffled into the mix.
Glover's second-act dance foursome features Washington's own tap dance kid, 15-year-old Cartier Williams, joined by Ashley DeForest and Maurice Chestnut. Glover calls them Chapter IV: "That's about the four of us, and we're all at different chapters in the dance." He sees himself as a link to the past, to a generation of dancers who hoofed and hit and made it the hard way. "I was able to be around those guys and get information from them firsthand. And now I'm able to watch these guys coming up, so we all have something that we each can teach to each other. . . . As entertainers now we can either come up and carry on the tradition or not." Still, it's clear where Glover's sympathy lies. "It's something I feel honored and privileged to do."
"IMPROVOGRAPHY II" -- Sunday 2 and 7. Music Center at Strathmore, North Bethesda. 301-581-5100.