John Cage / Gregory Hines

On this day in classical music: John Cage’s “Second Construction,” a chamber work for four percussionists, received its premiere in Portland, Oregon in 1940. The second of three works bearing the title “Construction,” the second was composed while Cage was working at the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle, Washington and touring the West Coast with a percussion ensemble he and Lou Harrison had founded. The work is notable for its use of prepared piano, with a piece of cardboard and a screw placed in the piano strings. Listen to the Simantra Grupo de Percusao perform Cage’s “Second Construction.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RtwvPpeEsw

On this day in the musical theatre: Gregory Hines was born in New York City in 1946. He began dancing as a child and would often appear with his older brother Maurice. Hines worked in film and television, but late in his career, he enjoyed considerable success in musicals. He earned Tony Award nominations for his roles in the Broadway productions of “Eubie!,” “Comin’ Uptown,” “Sophisticated Ladies” and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” and earned a 1992 best actor Tony for “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a musical bio of Jelly Roll Morton. Hines died of liver cancer in 2003. Listen to Hines and cast perform “That’s How You Jazz” from “Jelly’s Last Jam” on the 1992 Tony Awards broadcast. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJN0hWe-PRg

Musical musings: On the short list of people who have so much talent they hardly know what to do with it all, count Gregory Hines, the star, and George C. Wolfe, the author and director of the new Broadway musical “Jelly’s Last Jam.” Mr. Hines’ brilliance is no secret. Few, if any, tap dancers in this world can match him for elegance, speed, grace and musicianship, and, as if that weren’t enough, he also happens to be a silken jazz crooner, supple in voice and plaintive in emotions. In the role of Jelly Roll Morton, Mr. Hines gets to display these gifts to the fullest, not to mention his relatively unsung prowess as an actor. Even when the band is taking a break, every note he hits rings true. In one remarkable sequence that seems to be Mr. Wolfe’s pointed response to the vendors’ scene in “Porgy and Bess,” the young Jelly, played by that exuberant dancer Savion Glover, leaves behind his strait-laced Creole upbringing to assimilate the authentic indigenous music of a diverse army of New Orleans street singers. This leads to a show-stopping tap challenge between Mr. Glover and Mr. Hines — in which their heads, wrists and elbows are choreographed (by Mr. Hines and Ted L. Levy) as tightly as their feet — and then into a galvanic blues belted out in a Storyland brothel by Mary Bond Davis. As Jelly moves on toward fame and fortune in 1920’s Chicago, he passes through a dance hall in which a whirlwind of a chorus picks up his steps, much as his tinkling piano is echoed by the blast of horns. “That’s How You Jazz,” as the number is called, makes the invention of jazz a miraculous, eruptive theatrical event. – Frank Rich in The New York Times

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