A legacy from the soul of its shoes

Shortly after Los Angeles’ Jazz Tap Ensemble finishes tonight’s performance at the Ford Amphitheatre, co-founder and artistic director Lynn Dally will leave for New York to participate in a weeklong Tap City festival that begins Saturday. She also plans to be part of the faculty at two other such gatherings, the Chicago Human Rhythm Project and L.A. Tapfest, both in August. And just two months ago, her busy 10-member company performed six concerts in Lyon, France.

As the troupe celebrates its 25th anniversary with tonight’s concert, in short, its dance card is full, and the landscape is echoing with celebrations of the art of tap. But during a recent conversation at the Dance Arts Academy at La Brea and Wilshire, where the group often rehearses, Dally recalled that in 1979, when the company was formed, the dance world was much less welcoming not only for the Jazz Tap Ensemble but also for tap in general.

“We were on a mission: We thought we were going to save tap dancing for the world, and one way of doing that was to put it into a concert format,” says Dally, who learned tap while she was growing up -- along with the requisite ballet, acrobatics and baton -- at her father’s dance studio in Columbus, Ohio.

When Dally and colleagues Camden Richman and Fred Strickler defected from the world of modern dance to found the Jazz Tap Ensemble, the Broadway opening of “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk” was 17 years away, and Savion Glover was in first grade. According to Dally, even the older tap legends thought the trio had lost their minds when they decided to promote tap -- formerly the province of vaudeville shows and movie musicals -- as a concert dance form.

“There was a moment when Charles ‘Honi’ Coles said: ‘You mean, you expect people to pay attention to tap dancing for two hours in a night?’ ” recalls Dally, who was in her late 30s when the company was founded. “ ‘Don’t you know that tap dancing is an act, and you do it for seven minutes? What are you thinking?’ ”

And this was “rhythm” tap -- that’s synonymous with “jazz” tap -- not the “show” tap of Broadway musicals or the movies. Tap artists groan when asked to define the difference, but Dally and others say it’s about the sound rather than the look, the difference between Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Fred Astaire.

The women of the Jazz Tap Ensemble jettisoned chorus-girl skirts and high-heeled shoes in favor of slacks and flat-heeled oxfords. “We saw what an instrument a real tap shoe was, and that’s when we said, ‘Let’s just get rid of these high heels, because the sound isn’t good enough,’ ” Dally says.

Presenters of dance concerts remained as perplexed as Coles. “It was very new, and nobody else was doing it,” Dally says. “At the time, people who presented dance had no category for this. A category had to be made, and we helped to make that.”

Dally adds that, while rhythm was the thing, she and the other company founders also wanted to bring to tap a modern dancer’s sensibility about the use of space. “I was trying to get tap dancing away from that line-dancing, flat concept -- there are other ways of getting energy in a dance besides pounding away in a line.”

Marda Kirn, director of the Boulder, Colo.-based International Tap Assn. and formerly a producer, presenter and director of the now-defunct Colorado Dance Festival, agrees that the Jazz Tap Ensemble, which includes both dancers and musicians, fueled the beginning of a tap revolution.

“Lynn was absolutely pioneering in creating a tap company that toured -- I believe they are the longest-touring tap company of that level of artistry,” Kirn says of the group, which has performed with such tap masters as the late Gregory Hines (a video tribute to Hines will be part of tonight’s concert), Jimmy Slyde, Dianne Walker, Eddie Brown and Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers. The troupe has performed in London, Paris, Madrid and Moscow and at such noted U.S. venues as the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall and Harlem’s Apollo Theater. And, Kirns says, it “has been a real incubator for talent.”

Both Dally and Kirns say Los Angeles proved to be an incubator as well, because many retired Hollywood tap stars were here to lend their expertise. As Kirns puts it: “I think tap dancing has always sort of straddled the popular and the more esoteric worlds of art, the commercial and the concert stage. L.A. is a kind of caldron for that.”

At the time they formed the ensemble, Dally, Richman and Strickler were devoted to honoring the dance form’s African American roots -- but the three white dancers were frustrated by the fact that, in the company’s first years, they couldn’t find any black dancers of their generation who felt the same way.

“Most black parents didn’t want their kids to go into tap dancing because it was still viewed as an Uncle Tom thing,” Dally says. “They should go learn about computers or learn about science or go to law school -- become professionals. And no way a tap dancer could be viewed as a professional anything.”

All that changed, Dally says, with “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk,” which introduced Glover’s almost religious devotion to the history of rhythm tap to a broad audience. “It was a historical moment -- tap became not only acceptable but desirable,” Dally says.

The Jazz Tap Ensemble has more than a passing connection with “Noise/Funk”: Derick K. Grant, a veteran of that show, is also a Jazz Tap member, and Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, a native Angeleno and the only female dancer ever cast in “Noise/Funk,” will perform her solo “Flight of the Bumblebee” on tonight’s program.

Sumbry-Edwards, 28, African American and considered a rising star in the new generation of tappers, is too young to have observed how tap dance fell out of favor with the black community in the 1960s and ‘70s. She also doesn’t feel the need to throw away her high-heeled tap shoes to prove a point. “I feel like if I want to wear heels in this solo, I’m going to do it,” she asserts from her New York home. “It’s just for the visual effect -- yes, I am a lady, and yes, I can do this thing, and yes, I have on high heels. And the rhythms and the sounds are still there.”

The young dancer does, however, believe in an old-fashioned discipline when it comes to her art form. “Right now, these kids throw on the shoes and they want to get up and improvise. Little do they know that a lot of us were in ballet and jazz class at 4 and 5 and 6 years old -- the guys too -- and a lot of us were taking piano and voice lessons, not just tap dancing. That’s why it looks different.”

Sumbry-Edwards adds that each succeeding generation seems to have something to contribute to the tap recipe. “If you listen to the music that’s being played on the radio on a lot of different stations, from rock to reggae to jazz, a lot of different music styles are starting to sound very earthy -- I don’t want to say ‘ethnic,’ because that’s too broad, but very drum-oriented, with that go-to-war pulse, that island pulse,” she says. “I’m starting to see and feel that even with tap dancing -- it’s not just on the radio, not just in the music videos, but it’s started to cross over into our dance.

“I’m curious to see what’s going to happen; I can’t see ahead that far,” she says.

“I just give the information to the younger ones and hope it registers, and I hope they feel the same love and respect and honor that I do about the dance, and that they will keep that and pass it on.”

*

Jazz Tap Ensemble

Where: John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood

When: 8:30 p.m. today

Price: $12 to $35

Contact: (323) 461-3673