Glover's 'Soundz': A Resonant Success

It was a show to send the Three Tenors running for cover, and earplugs. What Savion Glover called "Bare Soundz" also could have been dubbed the Three Tappers, with Glover holding center stage at the Warner Theatre on Thursday, flanked by two other hoofers -- one being Washington native Cartier Williams -- in a remarkable explosion of steel on wood.

Glover, at age 34 America's premiere tap dancer, has always made more of a musical impact than a visual one -- he's not one to fly across the stage with a display of fancy steps. His physical presence is understated, even as his tricky rhythms hit like a nail gun. Over the past few years, Glover's solo dance shows have shared a similar focus on the man as a somewhat stationary drum kit, with those sledgehammer heels and the crisp, racing staccato he unleashes from the balls of his feet.

In "Bare Soundz," however, Glover breaks sharply with precedent. One difference is that there is no band onstage, no instrumental music backing him up, either live or recorded. But Glover triples up on the sound: He is joined by Floridian Marshall L. Davis Jr. and, in a last-minute replacement for Maurice Chestnut, the teenage Williams, whom Glover spotted years ago and has groomed as his protege. Williams had a role in Glover's touring production of "Bring In 'da Noise, Bring In 'da Funk" (as did Davis) and is now the production manager of Savion Glover Productions.

Among the three, Glover is more equal than the others, though he's not as dominant as you might expect. Generosity with the spotlight was on view here as much as virtuosity. "Bare Soundz," presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society, is just that -- no frills, just tap dancing pared down to its essence, the smack of shoe and surface (helped out with strong amplification). Each man danced on a small square platform. There was nothing more to it, but it's a surprisingly complete show.

Glover is capable of all the complexities of jazz phrasing, both bass line and melody, the wild improvisation, structure and deconstruction, departure and return. Davis was his highly capable co-pilot through fantastic realms at a furious tempo. If Williams didn't have quite as much to do, he proved he can meld seamlessly into the group, picking up the rhythm without a backward glance, joining a solo midstream with near-perfect unison.

Despite his air of slacker nonchalance -- the dreadlocks, baggy pants and unbuttoned shirt -- Glover is as old-school as they come. This show recaptures something of the spirit of adventure in smoky jazz clubs and harks back to tap's standing in the 1940s and '50s as a test of musical wits played out on street corners. Except that back then they didn't make feet like Glover's. His are strictly 21st-century neo-hoofer material, able to mix a light, clean ripple with the authoritative wham of a marching band's drum section.

A high point of Thursday's performance was "GIGANTIC Steps," Glover's tribute to John Coltrane's landmark composition "Giant Steps." Is it possible to approximate in tap shoes the improvisational breakthroughs, complexity and technical finesse that Coltrane achieved with his recording? There were some rough patches at the start of this threesome's attempt. But while Davis and Williams set up a square, steady rhythm, Glover supplied an answer with an extended opus of his own, an agile and explosive polyrhythmic journey so impossible to connect with one man and one pair of shoes that you half expected light to bend or rain to fall up or some other law-breaking phenomenon to join him in his act of giddy defiance.

Davis had some heavy-hitting solos of his own, and Glover seemed to enjoy them almost as much as his own dancing, grinning and snapping his fingers in time as he looked on. When he took the spotlight, Glover fed off the evening's camaraderie, becoming more physically wild than we've seen in past tours. As a solo artist, he tends to draw into himself, hunch over his shoes, glue his eyes to the ground, but not here. The way he crisscrossed his feet, shooting one behind the other, producing sound, somehow, from the outer edge of the sole, then hammering with the force of a giant set of pistons -- it looked like a pair of devastating shin splints waiting to happen. But nothing goes wrong in Glover's show. He's got the laws of physics on his side, and they simply roll over for him.