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• Jason Samuels Smith

From:

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Dates: 1980-
Birth Date: Oct 4, 1980

Place of Birth: New York City

Jason Samuels Smith, the profoundly talented jazz tap dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director who is regarded as the visionary leader of his generation, was born and raised in what he has proudly proclaimed as the "Hell's Kitchen" section of New York City (the midtown west side of Manhattan). His mother, Sue Samuels, of Jewish descent, was a jazz dancer and teacher who had performed in the 1979 Broadway musical Gottu Go Disco. His father, Jo Jo Smith (Joseph Benjamin Smith), of African-American parentage, was a renowned jazz dancer and choreographer. Jo Jo's mother, Anna Grayson, had been a dancer with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, and his father, Benjamin Smith, had been a great Chicago tap dancer who taught the renowned Nicholas Brothers. Jo Jo had performed on Broadway in the 1964 revival of West Side Story (1957) and the musical A Joyful Noise (1966), but he was best known for being the dance consultant to the 1978 film musical Saturday Night Fever, starring John Travolta. He was also the charismatic director of Jo Jo's Dance Factory, predecessor to the world-famous Broadway Dance Center which, when founded in 1984, after having been Jo Jo's Dance Factory and the Hatchett & Hines Performing Arts Center, grew to become one of the largest "drop-in" dance training centers in the world.

It was at the Jo Jo's Dance Factory, with a faculty of ten instructors, including his wife, Sue Samuels, that Jo Jo taught daily jazz and disco dance classes to professionals in television and Broadway shows. "My kids had to be in my classes, they were always around the dance studio," said Sue Samuels (who stayed at the studio, after Jo Jo left for California, through its transition to becoming the Broadway Dance Center) about her daughter Elka (born in 1977) and son Jason who, at the age of two (1982) "was doing hip-hop-- doing the worm on the floor. He was very coordinated, he could just always dance." Watching their parents teach, Elka and Jason listened to and looked at the choreographic translations of rhythm & blues, funk, and jazz. Sue Samuels also made sure that her kids could count the music-- whether it was a 4/4 blues, a 2/4 samba, or the more unusual 5/8 time signature of Dave Brubeck's "Take Five"-- and think about it.

Enrolled at the age of seven in Frank Hatchett's Children's Program at Broadway Dance Center, Smith studied ballet, jazz, and tap with Judy Bassing, his first teacher. His young career blossomed, with appearances at the age of nine on Sesame Street, the popular PBS-TV educational children's program that featured Savion Glover as the tap-dancing cowboy. But while Smith had been totally immersed in the dance world during elementary school, he was more interested in sports during middle, and high school. It was not until Glover began teaching master classes at the Broadway Dance Center that Smith's interest in tap dance was sparked: "He treated me like family and I had a lot in common with him," said Smith about Glover. "We liked the same music and dressed similar. In my other classes I learned technique and style and more visible dancing. Savion's classes were more rhythmic and I was more in tune with the heavier hoofing style than with the lighter visible style." Smith was fifteen years old when he was signed in August 1996 to a contract as an understudy in the Broadway production of Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk. By the summer of 1997, he was incorporated into the show as principal dancer, and by 1998, as an understudy to the choreographer.

Attaining the star role in Glover's Noise/Funk, then becoming a member of Glover's first company NYOT (Not Your Ordinary Tappers) is only one highlight of Smith's story. If his early orientation in jazz and rhythm & blues (from his jazz-dancing parents) and his tenure dancing Glover's hard-hitting rhythm-and-funk style were two important developmental phases in his evolution as a rhythm-tap artist, an evermore crucial phase came in Smith's early twenties, when he became an avid collector and trader of film clips of black tap dancers in old movies (which he stored in his iPod and viewed and reviewed at every waking moment). He also deepened his listening to modern jazz musicians-- from Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis-- and began an investigation into his roots as a socially conscious African-American performance artist: "I really wanted to learn more about my [African] ancestors," he stated in 2002. It was at that phase that Smith began to embrace his multiracial and multicultural roots, to fuse his own style, which he described as "a mixture of the younger generation of now and the older generation."

In his solo performance at the first annual Los Angeles Tap Festival (which he co-founded , with Chloe Arnold in 2003), Smith changed the time signatures in his renditions of "Jitterbug Waltz" and Neil Hefti's "Cute" so often that it was hard for Jane Goldberg to keep up with him. Reviewing the show for Dance Magazine, she wrote: "He has invented a whole new vocabulary of rapid fire heels and toes. His taps are never so crowded that they overpower his unusually long phrases."

In the millennium, Smith emerged as a multitalented leader in the art form of tap-- as performer, choreographer, and director. Teaching an advanced tap class at the New York City Tap Festival in July of 2003, he showed himself to be a fantastic teacher who fused the four-square alphabet of stomp-brush-step into slamming, fun articulations within the grammar of the phrasings that explode with energy. That same year he co-founded, with Chloe Arnold, the Los Angeles Tap Festival. Smith was featured, along with veteran dancer Arthur Duncan, in the musical film short Tap Heat (2003), directed by Dean Hargrove and choreographed by Danny Daniels. In 2004, Smith received the prestigious Emmy Award for "Outstanding Choreography" for choreographing the opening tap number for the 2003 Jerry Lewis/MDA Telethon.

In 2005, Smith found an ideal musical collaboration with jazz pianist Theo Hill, and with him, collaborated with classical Indian Kathak master dance soloist Pandit Christresh Das, combining jazz musical ensemble with East Indian classical musicians in India Jazz Suite, which had decade-long tours around the world and received the west coast Isadora Award for exceptional dance performance. Featured performances in Derick Grant's mega-tap musical Imagine Tap! (2006), on FOX-TV's So You Think You Can Dance (2007), and CBS-TV's Secret Talents of the Stars, in which he choreographed a segment for R&B singer Mya (Harrison), followed. In 2007, Smith organized his own company of young blood dancers, A.C.G.I. (Anyone Can Get It), which had an unprecedented two-week engagement at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. Gracing the covers of such magazines as Dance Magazine and Dance Spirit, along with endorsing his own style of tap shoes with Bloch dance wear, Smith received the 2010 Dance Magazine Award.

Before he died, Gregory Hines called the twenty-one-year-old Smith, who he had just spied in a tap jam, "possibly the next ‘Greatest,'" placing Smith in the same league as John Bubbles, Honi Coles, Baby Laurence, Hines, and Savion Glover when it came to skill level in feet. Smith takes that forecast with utmost respect and seriousness. Following in the footsteps of his father and mother, peers and masters, he is changing the cadence and the pace of those steps for the new generation, demonstrating how an artist, in being the sum total of all parts, can synergize those individualities into brilliant new forces of energy. Smith, as a citizen of the tap world, has also synergistically and respectfully taken on the responsibility of paying homage to the art form while passing it on to the next generation.

"We need to come together as a tap community, as a dance community and as a music community," Smith has stated. "Basically, tap is all about love. It's all about your love for music, your love for dance, and how much you enjoy doing it. It should be about inspiring others to enjoy life. That's really what I've gotten out of tap-- the love for and the joy of life."

[Source: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]