Nostalgia and All That Jazz

Abstract

This chapter opens with the performative reunion of the Nicholas Brothers on Hollywood Palace on July 31, 1964; returns to the years 1958–1964, when the brothers navigated separate careers (with Harold expatriating to France and inventing a career as a soloist, and Fayard remaining in the United States to eke out a career as a jazz artist in a field offering few opportunities); and continues through the seventies, when popular tastes for tap nostalgia forced the brothers to repeat many of the routines that had made them famous in the thirties and forties. The chapter’s story takes place roughly in the fifties and sixties, when tap dance fell into decline and dancers found themselves out of work. It was not until the early sixties, when dancers Baby Laurence, Bunny Briggs, Pete Nugent, Cholly Atkins, and Honi Coles performed at the Newport Jazz Festival, that signs appeared of a slow recovery for tap dance that would not materialize until the seventies. The ways Fayard and Harold, separately and as a team, found to endure these difficult decades were acts of reaction, whether through compromise, expediency, or expatriation, to the sociohistorical constraints that hindered black musical artists, and are testament to the solid musical foundation of their jazz tap dancing, which both flowed with and resisted the musical schisms of the time.