Dates: 1921-1974 Birth Date: Feb 24, 1921 Death Date: Apr 2, 1974 Place of Birth: Baltimore, Maryland Baby Laurence, extraordinary jazz tap dancer who had a profound influence on rhythm dancers in the second half of the twentieth century, was born Laurence Donald Jackson. His parents' names and occupations are unknown. He was a boy soprano at age twelve, singing with McKinney's Cotton Pickers. When the bandleader Don Redman came to town, he heard Jackson and asked his mother if he could take the boy on the road. She agreed, provided that her son was supplied with a tutor. Touring on the Loewe's circuit, Jackson's first time in New York was marked by a visit to the Hoofers Club in Harlem, where he saw the tap dancing of Honi Coles, Raymond Winfield, Roland Holder and Harold Mablin. "He gave me the devil because I turned all his steps around," he recalled about Mablin, "and pretty soon he just gave me ideas and I went on from there." He returned home sometime later to a sudden tragedy: both his parents had died in a fire. "I don't think I ever got used to the idea," he told Marshall Stearns. "They always took such good care of me." Laurence and his brother formed a vocal group called The Four Buds and tried to establish themselves in New York. He worked in the Harlem nightclub owned by Dickie Wells, the retired dancer from the group of Wells, Mordecai and Taylor, who nicknamed his "Baby" and encouraged his dancing. He frequented the Hoofers Club, absorbing ideas and picking up steps from Eddie Rector, Pete Nugent, Toots Davis, Jack Wiggins, and Teddy Hale, who became his chief dancing rival. "I saw a fellow dance and his feet never touched the floor," tap dancer Bunny Brigs recalled when first seeing Laurence dance in the 1930s. Baby worked after-hour sessions, danced around Harlem, Washington, D.C., and Cincinnati, and began playing theaters such as Harlem's Apollo in the late 1930s. He performed with a group called The Six Merry Scotchmen (in some billings, Harlem Highlanders), who dressed in kilts, danced, and sang Jimmie Lunceford arrangements in five-part harmony. Around 1940 Baby focused on tap dancing and became a soloist. Through the decade, he danced with the big bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Woody Herman, and in the fifties danced in small Harlem jazz clubs. Under the influence of jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker and other bebop musicians, Laurence expanded tap technique into jazz dancing. He performed with jazz pianist Art Tatum, duplicating in his feet what Tatum played with his fingers. Through listening hard to Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell as well as the jazz drummers such as Max Roach, Laurence developed a way of improvising solo lines and variations as much like a horn man as a percussionist. He also worked with Charlie Mingus at the Showplace and continued to develop solo routines. "He was more a drummer than a dancer," Whitney Balliett wrote in New York Notes (1976). "He did little with the top half of his torso. But his legs and feet were speed and thunder and surprise . . . a succession of explosions, machine-gun rattles and jarring thumps." Like musicians in a jazz combo, Laurence was also a fluent improviser who took solos, traded breaks, and built upon motifs that were suggested by previous hornmen. He was a master of dynamics who would start a thirty-two-bar chorus with light heel-and-toe figures, then drop in heavy offbeat accents and sprays of rapid toe beats that gave way to double-time bursts of rhythm. Beset by drugs, alcohol, and financial troubles, Laurence stopped performing in the late fifties. After a long illness he returned to Harlem in the early sixties to work again in small jazz clubs. By 1960, Baby began a long time engagement with Charlie Mingus in the downtown Greenwich Village jazz club, the Showplace; that summer danced with Max Roach and Charlie Mingus in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1962 he was a sensation at the Newport Jazz Festival, in a legendary concert that included Pete Nugent, Honi Coles and Bunny Briggs, and that marked the so-called revival of tap dancing. Laurence drifted into near oblivion in the late sixties, dancing weekends in a restaurant in Gaithersburg, Maryland, with an excellent trio headed by drummer Eddie Phyfe. In 1973, he reappeared in New York City, heading up the successful Sunday afternoon tap dancing sessions at the Jazz Museum. During this time, he took in students, danced at the Palace with Josephine Baker, did some television, and gave one of his triumphant performances at the Newport-New York Jazz Festival. Laurence is regarded as an authentic jazz dancer who further developed the art of tap dancing by treating the body as a percussive instrument. "In the consistency and fluidity of his beat, the bending melodic lines of his phrasing, and his overall instrumentalized conception, Baby is a jazz musician," Nat Hentoff wrote in the liner notes to Baby Laurence--Dance Master, a 1959 recording of Laurence's rhythmic virtuosity that demonstrates the inextricable tie between jazz tap dancing and jazz music. [Baby Laurence Jackson's tap dancing can be heard on Baby Laurence Dancemaster (Classic Jazz CJ30, recorded 1959, released 1977) with liner noted by Nat Hentoff. See also Whitney Balliett, New York Notes: A Journal of Jazz 1972-1975 (1976), for a vivid recapturing of Laurence's tap dancing style, and Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968); Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]
