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Omar Edwards [biography]
Dates: 1975-
Birth Date: Jul 2, 1975
Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York
Omar Edwards, rhythm tap dancer whose smooth style went counter to the hard-hitting, funk-driven style of his peers, was born Omar Anthony Edwards in Brooklyn, New York, and raised by his grandmother in Far Rockaway, Queens. His Liberian-born mother, Balee Edwards, died when he was ten years old; his father, Anthony William Edwards, went to prison when Omar was three, and during the twelve years he served time earned six degrees in philosophy. Edwards had little awareness and no interest in tap dancing until the age of ten, when his grandmother showed him a newspaper ad for The Tap Dance Kid and informed him that the thirteen-year-old star of that Broadway show, Savion Glover, was his cousin. That his cousin was a Broadway star inspired, though he did not realize it at the time, of his interest in tap.
In 1989, when the movie Tap, starring Gregory Hines, came out, he read in a Jet magazine article that his cousin Savion was in it, and began to think about tap. From his grandmother's phone book he looked up the number of his aunt, Yvette glover, Savion's mother. "Little Omar, I know who you are," she told him. He told her he wanted to dance and she said, "All right. Meet me downtown, Forty-Fourth Street in Manhattan, the Minskoff Theatre." He was twelve-and-a-half years old. He took the train from Far Rockaway to 42nd Street, and walked to the theatre where Black and Blue was playing and was taken downstairs to Glover's dressing room. There, Yvette Glover had given him a pair of tan-colored tap shoes. Edwards began to take the nightly train ride from Queens to Manhattan to see Black and Blue. For the next two years, he hung around masters Jimmy Slyde, Buster Brown, and Chuck Green, as well as Van Porter, Tarik Winston, and Dule Hill who, says Edwards, "showed me so much love, and always gave me beauty." He also went to the studio of Henry LeTang who took him into the studio with the instructions to write down all the steps he knew. "I would do a step, and he would correct it, and then he left the room to go teach privates, leaving me to work on my own steps," Edwards recalled. He began working all the time, practicing his on the street, in the laundromat, and on the train. By the time Black and Blue closed, in January of 1991, Edwards had learned enough tap dance to parlay it into a team effort.
At the age of sixteen, Edwards formed the tap duo Toe Jam with Daniel B. Wooten, Jr., who had also performed in Black and Blue. Together the high-energy and exuberant team (known for dancing in Capezeo K360s that were reinforced for all their toe stands) appeared thirteen times on Ed McMahon's Star Search. They won the grand prize Star Search championship competition on February 22, 1994 (coached by Van Porter) to become the youngest adult dance champions to win, with an award of $25,000. Success was immediate. There were appearances on the Arsenio Hall Show and performances for New York City's Tap Extravaganza and Gus Giordano's Dance Congress. Just when Toe Jam was getting raves for being as classy as the Nicholas Brothers and as athletic as the Four Step Brothers, during a tour in Europe, Wooten injured himself, leaving Edwards to work solo, doing eight shows a week. He returned home to audition for the international touring production of Black and Blue, and was cast in the production, a dream came true. Edwards got to work with such original cast members as the singer Linda Hopkins, the great tap dancer Bunny Briggs, and the young dancer Dormeshia Sumbry, who he had first seen as a twelve year-old dancer in the original production.
When the Black and Blue tour finished, Edwards set his sights on Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk, directed by George C. Wolfe and choreographed by Savion Glover,; the show was about to open at New York's Publoic theatre. Though Edwards did not make the debut performance at the Public, he did make it to Broadway when in 1996 he joined the cast of Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk as understudy to Vincent Bingham, Dule Hill, Jimmy Tate, and Baakari Wilder, and in short time became a permanent cast member. It was while performing in that show that Edwards became reacquainted with the young tap dancer Dormeshia Sumbry, the girl he had met as a twelve-year-old dancer in Black and Blue. Friendship blossomed into love after Sumbry was invited to join the international touring cast of Noise/Funk. They were married in 1998, taking on the challenge of raising a family while maintaining separate careers as tap artists.
Meanwhile, Savion Glover asked Edwards to join his new company of young blood dancers, many from the cast of Noise/Funk, which he called NYOT-- Not Your Ordinary Tappers. While the company was known for its hard-hitting, funk-driven style, how odd it was that Melba Huber described Omar Edwards, in his solo "What the World Needs Now," as "an exciting dancer and now has a smooth style." The twenty-three-year-old NYOT was the most unordinary of the group, and he had always distinguished himself-- whether he chose to or not-- as the odd man out. He would evolve a succulent lyrical style of rhythm dancing that was the most unlike Glover's to become the high-thinking philosopher of tap dance-- resurrecting the earth-stomping rhythms into their highest spiritual dimensions. Tap dance for Edwards was a spiritual journey, and he was supremely grateful for the opportunity to go on the trip. As he self-effacingly wrote in his one-line bio in the Savion Glover/Downtown program: "Omar Edwards is very happy to be here."
Edwards was among the original members of the company, he was also the first of the NYOTs to break away from the Glover compound. "From from my interpretation of Savion's work I realized that tap dancing was music," said Edwards. He announced "I want to be a musician with my dancing, a straight-up soloist musician." In 1998, he recorded eighteen "songs" (tap/instrumental numbers) for his album Tap Dancing Is Music, which has sold over 5,000 copies. And in 1999, he presented Working on My Music at downtown New York's Duplex Cabaret Theater. Working as a tap soloist with his group named Jubali (for his mother), a musical ensemble that included bassist Andy McCloud and violinist Leonardo Suarez Paz, Edwards demonstrated how "music is tap and tap is music" by turning the cabaret into "a musical space" that spun the audience "into a muse of feelings."
There were more ephemeral and experimental works that Edwards produced, which in the sheer audacity of their conception distinguish him as a wildly imaginative and free jazz artist. At Minton's, the infamous after-hours jazz club in Harlem where Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk once engaged in all night cutting sessions, Edwards would show up for his weekly gig with his band, Seven Less, and a large black box: "I made this box in which you could not see me get in or out. I stepped into it, and it covered me from the top of my head to my knees, so you could only see my feet," Edwards described about the first fifteen minutes of the show. "People never knew we existed," said Edwards about the hour-long sets that challenged the audience to focus its attention on disembodied sounds. He persisted nonetheless in making appearances with his black platform boxes at such late-night, open microphone jazz clubs in Manhattan as the Iridium, Smoke, Showman's, and Saint Nick's Pub.
In his solo performance at the New York City Tap Festival's Tap All-Stars at the Duke Theatre in 2002, Edwards presented another unusual solo. On a totally darkened stage, he stepped onto a square platform, into a tightly lit spotlight, that revealed only his two bare feet-- and proceeded to dance African-style, by making succulent flat-footed slapping and shuffling sounds on the wood. Minimal and severe, with only those agile feet framed in the light on the large black stage and whisking out rhythms, his flat-footed gioube was a startling and illuminating reminder of the roots of tap in the ancestral soils of black Africa.
[Source: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]