Converging Styles

Abstract

Building from a musical and movement analysis of the jazz tap choreography in Orchestra Wives (1942), this chapter gives an explication of the Nicholas Brothers’ “classical jazz tap” dancing as the open-partner synchronization of adagio ballroom dance, the Africanist-inflected stage and social dance styles of the teens and twenties, the flash and acrobatics of turn-of-the-century black comedy dance, the formal elegance and fastidious movement rhythms of the class act, and the rhythmic drive of the challenge dance—all absorbed by the Nicholases and then distilled into their own distinctive style of American jazz dancing. The speedy, swinging rhythms of the Nicholas Brothers’ drum dancing—dissonant in the clatter of metal tapping, yet exciting in the offbeat, rhythmic propulsion—sounded out a new breed of black American jazz artists who shaped a classical American style of jazz dancing that in sound and shape was purely modernist.