Newport Jazz Festival 1962
Baby Laurence
performer
Briggs, Bunny
performer
Coles, Charles "Honi"
performer
Atkins, Charles "Cholly"
performer
Nugent, Pete
performer
Festival
1962-07-07
Freebody Park
The 1962 Newport jazz Festival was the 7th under the control of George Wein, the 8th overall since the first such event in 1954. After the riotous debacle of 1960, there had been something called "Music at Newport" in 1961, with which Wein had no connection. The 1962 festival, directed by Wein, was an overall effort to return the concerts to their former musical status (1959 had been a mixture of jazz and rock music); Wein chose an overall theme, "The Meaning of Jazz" including in his program as wide a coverage of jazz as was practical, from Louis Armstrong's All-Stars to modernists such as Sonny Rollins and Charles Mingus. There were jazz-related events, such as gospel concerts and five jazz concerts July 4-7, 1962. Saturday afternoon July 7 was given over to a jazz tap-dancing demonstration-- a classic American art long obscured by the belly-and-bottom modern dance beloved by Broadway, Hollywood, and television. The dancers accompanied by a loose narration by Marshall Stearns who pointed out that tap-dancing resulted from a slow fusion of Irish jigs and clogs and various soft-shoe dances, like the Sand, invented by American Negroes. They demonstrated-- singly, in pairs, in trios, and all together-- the formidable intricacies of "time" steps, the many "wing" steps (saw wings, pump wings, double-back wings), and "flash" steps, such dances as the trenches-and-over-the-top and soft-shoe "class" acts, and the styles of originators like Eddie Rector, John W. Bubbles, and Bill Robinson. Coles and Atkins performed a delicious class act. At a slow, slow tempo, they slid across, around and up and down the stage, mixing in offhand gull turns, polite double toe-taps, hip wiggles, and arm movements ranging from cold-engine propeller motions to weighty pumping. The afternoon came to a climax in two dances--one by Briggs and one by Laurence (accompanied by the Duke Ellington band). Briggs, short, slim, and shaggy-headed, is a fey, airborne dancer whose steps and motions are an exquisite balance of comic exaggeration and almost fussy precision. In the paddle-and-roll (a Midwestern dance that arrived in New York in the forties), he began with a long sequence of abrupt, irregular heel beats, punctuated by silences and quick, stiff head-and-arm motions, broke into a barrage of military-type flame strokes, and settled into soft, dizzying heel-and-toe beats (his torso and head now motionless) that carried him smoothly all over the seemingly ice-coated stage. Gradually, he brought his body into action with swaying motions, high-kneed walking (the clickclickclickclick of his feet never ceasing), and drawn-out slides, and then released loud, fast staccato beats, sometimes with both feet and sometimes with first one and then the other, and returned to his opening pattern. Laurence unenviably followed with a bop dance, and, though exceptional, did not quite match Briggs. (Laurence's style--intense, direct, overbearing--is the opposite of Briggs'.) At the close of the afternoon, all five men did an uproarious takeoff on rock-and-roll and the Twist. This Saturday evening performance in which the Ellington band made a "surprise appearance" to back dancers Bunny Briggs and Baby Laurence who "thrilled a near-capacity audience of 12,000 fans."
Program had the accompaniment of drummer Jo Jones and trumpeter Roy Eldridge (plus bass and piano), both of whom equaled what they were watching.
Performing Arts Encyclopedia
http://www.loc.gov/performingarts
Strattemann, Klaus: Duke Ellington: Day by Day, Film by Film. Copenhagen: Jazz Media (1992).
Balliett, Whitney: Collected Works : A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000. St. MartinÕs Press (2000).
Tap Dance America
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/tda/tda-home.html
Pete Nugent (biography)
loc.music.tdabio.145
Charles "Cholly" Atkins (biography)
loc.music.tdabio.17
Charles "Honi" Coles (biography)
loc.music.tdabio.43
Bunny Briggs (biography)
loc.music.tdabio.27
"Baby" Laurence Jackson (biography)
loc.music.tdabio.109
tda
IHAS
151216
loc.music.tda.1149