{"title":"Swing to Bop","authors":"C. Hill","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter narrates the radical change in musical tastes and musical revolution of swing to bop, and the challenging positioning of the Nicholases within that musical revolution: the brothers’ insistence on remaining within the swing dance tradition and a musical aesthetic that was aligned with the classic jazz of Duke Ellington. This choice ran counter to the choices of such tap dancers as Teddy Hale, Jimmy Slyde, and members of the Hoofers, who forged a transition to the cadences of bebop. The Nicholas brothers carved a path between these two musical traditions, demonstrating a full-bodied expressiveness in their dancing that was steeped in classical jazz and the quintessence of swing.","PeriodicalId":387827,"journal":{"name":"Brotherhood in Rhythm","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120982864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Forties Swing, Hollywood Flash","authors":"C. Hill","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the Hollywood musical films of the Nicholas Brothers under a five-year contract with Twentieth Century-Fox that brought them to the highest level of notoriety as jazz tap dancers in the Swing era. In Down Argentine Way, despite the mere three-and-a-half-minute scene in which the Brothers appeared, audiences flocked to the theater to see them perform the title song. In Sun Valley Serenade, with Dorothy Dandridge, the Brothers’ Chattanooga Choo Choo number was the aural and visual embodiment of swing music. In Orchestra Wives, Harold performed a run-up-the-wall into a backward flip and split that had never before been seen on film. And in their spectacular Jumping Jive number in Stormy Weather, Fayard jumped down one step and landed in a split, Harold leap-frogged over Fayard and landed on the next step into another split, and the Brothers alternately jumped over each other until they reached the bottom of the stairs—a routine Fred Astaire said was the greatest he had ever seen on film.","PeriodicalId":387827,"journal":{"name":"Brotherhood in Rhythm","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123628464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blackbirds in New York","authors":"C. Hill","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter narrates the performances of the Nicholas Kids/Nicholas Brothers in various contexts including Pie, Pie, Blackbird, a Vitaphone short subject film featuring Eubie Blake and his jazz orchestra, and the twenty-first edition of the Cotton Club Parade with Cab Calloway and His Cotton Club Orchestra. The Cotton Club became home base for the Nicholases, despite the strict segregation of the races (all performers black, clientele white) and afforded them the opportunity to hone their musical routines under the auspices of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington’s bands.","PeriodicalId":387827,"journal":{"name":"Brotherhood in Rhythm","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115100028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nostalgia and All That Jazz","authors":"C. Hill","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0010","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":387827,"journal":{"name":"Brotherhood in Rhythm","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114604935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Legacy","authors":"C. Hill","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv15wxqzz.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv15wxqzz.16","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter begins with the Nicholas Brothers’ 1998 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award citation, and continues with a descriptive summary of the classic style of jazz tap dancing created by the Nicholas Brothers and the several themes that recur in their work. The chapter then makes several assertions. First, The Nicholas Brothers were the greatest dancing duet of all time on film, and the medium of film was perfect for their signature style: synchronized precision movement that became the equivalent to the pas de deux in classical ballet, which challenged its partners to execute the highest degree of controlled precision while moving together with smooth effortlessness. Second, the Nicholas Brothers were role models in the black community; resisted black stereotypes in their professional and private lives; and were a persistent embodiment of nonviolent activism. Third, there is no more illustrative proof of the dance legacy of the Nicholas Brothers than their long-standing influence on future generations of tap dancers. Finally, the chapter enumerates the talents of Harold and Fayard Nicholas that did not reach fruition—because of both their devotion to dancing as a duo and to the narrow constraints that were imposed on them as African-American musical artists. This discussion does not bemoan this imposition but envisions the opportunities that should have been presented to them.","PeriodicalId":387827,"journal":{"name":"Brotherhood in Rhythm","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126049049","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Resurgence","authors":"C. Hill","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter begins with the challenge dance scene in the 1989 movie Tap!, starring Gregory Hines; the scene includes seventy-four-year-old Henry LeTang, seventy-two-year-old Howard “Sandman” Sims, seventy-one-year-old Steve Condos, sixty-seven-year-old Bunny Briggs, sixty-four-year-old Sammy Davis Jr., sixty-two-year-old Jimmy Slyde, and fifty-six-year-old Arthur Duncan and ends in a triumphant finale with sixty-eight-year-old Harold Nicholas taking a flying leap over the backs of the men, landing in a down-and-up split with a no-hands assist, and pulling himself up into perfect form as the circle of men triumphantly shout “Olé!” The chapter then retrospects the decade of the eighties, which saw the grand resurgence of tap dance.","PeriodicalId":387827,"journal":{"name":"Brotherhood in Rhythm","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126564969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Babes on Broadway","authors":"C. Hill","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"The Broadway and London musicals of the Nicholas Brothers solidified their career, working with the most noted of actors and directors, while distinguishing their individual talents. The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, the lavish musical revue staged by John Murray Anderson, with dances by George Balanchine, featured the Brothers with Josephine Baker. Lew Leslie’s London production of Blackbirds of 1936 was choreographed by the African-American choreographer Clarence “Buddy” Bradley and featured the Brothers dancing with the Blackbirds Beauty Chorus. The Rodgers and Hart comedy Babes in Arms, which opened on Broadway (1937), was choreographed by George Balanchine, who insisted that the Nicholas Brothers be cast; the ensuing “Egyptian Ballet” featuring the brothers was an enduring hit.","PeriodicalId":387827,"journal":{"name":"Brotherhood in Rhythm","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130394390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"All-Colored Comedy","authors":"C. Hill","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Musical comedy films made by the Nicholas Brothers bring to light the staggering racist stereotyping that existed in Hollywood in the thirties. In the Minstrel Night scene in Kid Millions (1934), star Eddie Cantor in blackface sings “I Want to be a Minstrel Man,” with close-ups on the clean, bright face of Harold Nicholas, singing the same lyrics, and the brothers having to play end men to the star. Nicholas Brothers continue to defy racial stereotyping, demonstrating their virtuosic brilliance in song and dance in Jealousy (1934), American Wife (1936), Big Broadcast of 1936, Black Network (1936), and The All-Colored Vaudeville Show (1935).","PeriodicalId":387827,"journal":{"name":"Brotherhood in Rhythm","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121043193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Converging Styles","authors":"C. Hill","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0008","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":387827,"journal":{"name":"Brotherhood in Rhythm","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128815411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Class Act and Challenge","authors":"C. Hill","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197523971.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter gives a historic explication of the Nicholas Brothers’ style of jazz tap dancing that was simultaneously a class act—a precision-style dancing of impeccable execution—and a mode of call-and-response interplay in which the brothers challenged each other in playful camaraderie to “up” each other in steps. At the turn of the century, concurrent with musical comedy dance teams working in the blackface tradition, an elite group of black performers rejected the minstrel show stereotype of the grinning-and- shuffling blackface clown, insisting upon the perfection of sound, step, and manner. Such pioneering class-act teams as Cole and Johnson, Johnson and Dean, and Greenlee and Drayton aspired to a purely artistic expression that was driven by the desire for respectability and equality on the American concert stage. The Nicholas Brothers transformed the fierce competition of the challenge dance by combining their specialties in building their routine to a climax; and trading rhythms back and forth in a lively and witty dialog that developed complex rhythmical ideas.","PeriodicalId":387827,"journal":{"name":"Brotherhood in Rhythm","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117035115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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