Tap Out

Jazz and tap dancing have had a long history of cross-pollination and creative symbiosis, from vaudeville all the way up to the avant-garde dueling of guitarist Derek Bailey and tap dancer Will Gaines. One could hardly choose more adept and venerated representatives from each camp than pianist McCoy Tyner and dancer Savion Glover. Indeed, between Tyner's hands-on involvement in most of the great jazz developments of the second half of the last century and Glover's undisputed championship of his art, the concert McCoy Tyner Trio With Savion Glover could be seen as a potential summit of the possibilities of jazz and tap in discourse. Tyner has had a career in jazz that has traversed both the diligently formal and the expressively abandoned reaches of the form. While recent years have found him investigating more traditional music than those enamored of his '60s-'70s Impulse Records heyday might prefer (such as his recent forays into Latin jazz), he remains a musician of stirring technical virtuosity and deft emotionality. Glover, too, though sometimes finding himself in contexts that might limit the more extreme impulses of the improviser, has the sort of confluence of personal style, indomitable fundamentals, and creative vision that denotes the great virtuosi in all mediums.
Fri., March 14, 8 p.m., 2008