Tap dancer Jumaane Taylor, 34, made his professional debut in 2001 with the company M.A.D.D. Rhythms, where he now serves on the board of directors. He teaches at the Sammy Dyer School of the Theatre, the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, and Roosevelt University. He debuted the John Coltrane interpretation Supreme Love in 2015, and as a 2017 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist he assembled the Jazz Hoofing Quartet. His current work in progress, Ugly Flavors, uses the music of Ornette Coleman and Igor Stravinsky.

  • The famous Nicholas Brothers routine in the all-Black 1943 musical Stormy Weather

Every now and then, Savion Glover, when he would come in for a show, he would come to the Sammy Dyer School of the Theatre and teach a workshop, and have whoever was in his cast also come teach—so Dianne Walker, Jimmy Slyde. A lot of great, masterful dancers were able to come through that school.

Ugly Flavors: A work-in-progress presentation from Jumaane Taylor Sat 11/7, 7 PM, livestream hosted by the Dance Center of Columbia College at dance.colum.edu, $20, all-ages

The Chicago Dancemakers Forum awarded me a grant for $15,000, and I used that to investigate improvisation with musicians. I put together a band—I called it the Jazz Hoofing Quartet. It was Makaya McCraven on drums, Justin Dillard on keys, and Marlene Rosenberg on bass. I loved it! It was heaven, because Makaya was so hot at the time, and anything he played was just on. And then Justin—I had known Justin since the Fred Anderson days at the Velvet Lounge, just years of jam sessions. And then Marlene, she has a history of playing with tap dancers—she knew and had met a lot of the masters that I would be mentioning in the post-talk, after we would play. I would show footage of Jimmy Slyde, and she would listen and be like, “Oh, that must be Jimmy Slyde!” Just by listening! It was this magical group.

Bebop is always at a fast tempo. Usually I feel like musicians hear the rhythm of the tap to up-tempo songs. I was talking to another tap dancer about this, one of my teachers almost, coming up in Chicago—Jay Fagan, who has a school in the west burbs. He was asking me if I ever heard of the tap dancers being responsible for the bebop sound. They used to say that the tap dancers started bebop, because the drummers weren’t hitting certain rhythms that the tap dancers were.

I’ve been on this back-and-forth with trying to represent tap within the jazz scene, and get people to just hear the natural sound of the metal on the wood. When I connect with musicians, it’s still a learning thing going on. In the past, I would mess with two different types of wood—maybe the first wood would rise a little bit, so I’d have a little bit more air underneath, and maybe the second floor would be straight flat on the surface. And then I would maybe change shoes, just because some of the shoes built these days, you can add another sole which would make it a little louder or a little deeper.

I’ve been listening to the music heavy, and the history behind The Rite of Spring just puts me in the mind of “ugly flavors,” with the riots and all that. And Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come is what I’m trying to choreograph to. I just don’t know how the jazz community might have received The Shape of Jazz to Come, with him even using that word “jazz.” Calling my group the Jazz Hoofing Quartet, I don’t think the jazz community received that well.