BUNNY BOP:

In 1964, Duke Ellington approached Bunny Briggs, the great tap-dancer who died just before Thanksgiving at the age of 92, with an idea for a special project he was working on. The pre-eminent American composer-bandleader described it as a "Concert of Sacred Music," which was a highly radical idea.

Fifty years ago, even the notion of jazz orchestras playing any place but ballrooms and gin joints was still a relatively new one, and for jazz musicians to perform in a church setting was unprecedented. Jazz was still associated with bootleg liquor and loose morality, but Ellington wanted to achieve the dual purpose of cleaning up the music's reputation and expressing his own ecumenical emotions. There was only one dancer in the world who could deliver that combination of reverence and joyful abandon that Ellington wanted, who could fully represent the African-American vernacular dance form in the same way that Ellington and his orchestra were representing jazz, who could simultaneously make religion fun and make fun into something undeniably spiritual. [...]

It was hardly the first time Briggs had radicalized tap-dancing by bringing it into a bold new setting. In the mid- to late 1940s, the dancer--who had been born Bernard Briggs in Harlem in 1922 and nicknamed Bunny early on because of his impressive speed--became to tap-dancing roughly what Ella Fitzgerald was to scat singing. He was the first to take an existing, specific form of expression and update it for the new musical language that was then known as bebop. There's a short 1950 film--in which Briggs appears in the company of two progressive swing veterans, Nat King Cole and Benny Carter--wherein his routine is only two minutes long but gives a clear impression of everything that he can do. Briggs enters to an exciting, dissonant fanfare reminiscent of Dizzy Gillespie, which is a sign that he's already incorporated the musical vocabulary of modern jazz into his dance routines, and throughout he works mainly to a bop-era rhythm section of piano, bass and drums in a super-fast tempo that is, again, thoroughly boppish.

What testifies more than anything to Briggs's special brilliance is what might be called his dancer's sense of dynamics, not only conveying the difference between loud and soft, as a horn player might, but between small intimate gestures and big dramatic ones.

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