A Tap Dancer's Place: After the Horn Players, Before the Drummer

That she can be both at once may be surprising. But tap and jazz grew up together, and in the 1930s and ‘40s, it was assumed that the greatest jazz bands — Duke Ellington’s, Count Basie’s — would bring tap dancers with them on tour. After World War II, though, as jazz separated from dance, hoofers became much scarcer in jazz clubs and concerts — never entirely absent but unusual, forgotten enough to be a novelty. Lately, that’s been changing a little, and Lerman is at the forefront.

In October, after appearing at the Harlem Jazz Festival, she heads out with the Shakes on a nationwide tour of their Harlem Renaissance tribute show, Harlem 100. (You can also hear her on the Shakes’ debut album, “Emergence.”) In December, she’ll be back in New York with her own band, the Love Movement, invited by jazz pianist Jason Moran to perform as part of his music series at the Whitney Museum.

You might say that Lerman, 33, has arrived. Quincy Jones, who helped choose her to perform in “Soundtrack of America,” the African American music series that opened the Shed last April, hails her as “an absolute tap dancing star” who “knows her roots.” But finding, or making, a place for herself in the jazz world hasn’t been easy. “Where does the tap dancer fit?” is a question she and a few other contemporaries have been trying to answer for years.

“From the very beginning,” she said in a recent interview, “music was what attracted me to tap.” And from near the beginning, 20 years ago, as a teenage prodigy in New York improvising at the tap jam sessions led by beloved elder Buster Brown, she has considered herself a musician.

Brown and the likes of Gregory Hines encouraged her to be herself as an artist, but many others told her she wasn’t doing it right. They advised her to smile more, to pay less attention to how she sounded and more to how she looked, to play the game or she wouldn’t get hired, especially as a young woman. “Not just men but women told me that, which was always alarming,” she said.

Lerman stuck to her path. She started bringing her shoes to jazz jam sessions — not Brown’s inviting, tap-centric events but the intimidating kind with a line of cutthroat horn players, mostly male, itching for a turn. “It was like a shootout,” Lerman recalled. “Can you prove yourself? Do you belong?”

She did and she didn’t. She had the skills and talent but she had to learn the rules. Esteemed trumpeter Roy Hargrove took her under his wing. He explained her place in the jam format, the order of solo spots. After all the horn players but before the drummer — that’s where she could have her brief say.

“That really helped me find my way in,” Lerman said. “And of course having someone like Roy be my shepherd helped, too. He made a space for me.”

“People starting seeing me as a musician and listening to me,” she continued, “because I was fitting in the right place.” After a while, she got her own jam session, at Small’s jazz club in Greenwich Village. But the turning point was attending late-night sessions at Dizzy’s Club, uptown at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Michael Mwenso, the host, kept inviting her onstage — because, he recalled, “there weren’t many like her, a female tap dancer who can hear the music like that.” Mwenso also had a hand in programming, and as he learned “how deep her musical understanding was,” he began booking her projects for the club.

After that, the world just opened up for her. “I couldn’t do enough gigs with people,” she said. “They were writing tunes and musical arrangements for me. They were including tap in their thing. It wasn’t even a thought in their mind that it didn’t belong.”

The musicians welcomed her, and she welcomed them — back to her Harlem apartment for informal late-late-night salons, listening to music and discussing it until the sun came up. “She became our mother hen, our Mary Lou,” Mwenso said, referring to Mary Lou Williams, the great jazz pianist who hosted seminal musical salons in her Harlem apartment in the 1940s and ’50s.

Out of these gatherings grew Mwenso & the Shakes. At first, Lerman joined the band as a featured artist, tapping on one or two songs a set. But sometimes she stayed. Mwenso realized that “we might as well leave her onstage through the whole set, and now we can’t do a gig without her,” he said.

“She’s a member of the rhythm section,” Mwenso continued, “improvising through all the songs, improvising just as deep as any other soloist. Her feet aren’t her greatest talent. It’s her ears.”

That can be what she looks like: someone listening. Although Lerman covers her small board with fancy footwork and participates happily in the Shakes’ showmanship, she’s not a performer who projects a big personality. Not everyone in a band needs to.

Lerman’s success in becoming part of the band (and not just after the horn players and before the drummer) makes her unusual, but not unique. Talk to the handful of young tap dancers who perform with top jazz bands — Brinae Ali, Sarah Reich, Maurice Chestnut and Jumaane Taylor, among others — and you hear similar stories. About the courage required to break into the jazz world. About the need to learn the rules and get someone to vouch for you. About facing skepticism, finding a place and meeting surprise.

For the past few years, Ali has been dancing with trumpeter Sean Jones, in their joint “Dizzy Spells” project and with the Baltimore Jazz Collective. “After a performance,” she said, “people always come up to me and say, ‘Amazing, it’s like you’re a musician.’”

She and the others recount many of the same frustrations. High on the list are floors, half of a dancer’s instrument. When first touring with the Shakes, Lerman encountered much warped, rotting wood and exposed nails (“even at the big festivals”). That’s why she, and the others, travel with their own wooden boards, reliable if restrictive. (Lerman’s board is supplied by a sponsor, O’Mara Sprung Floors.)

Even more important is amplification and sound balance. Ali, who also sings, likens the tap dancer’s problem to a vocalist’s: Everyone else in the band is louder. But because tap dancers are uncommon in bands, the technology and techniques for isolating the tap sound are still rather do-it-yourself. And sound engineers are often unaware of how to make sure a tap dancer is heard.

Above all, though, the challenge is to convince people that tap dancers can be musicians and bandleaders, not nostalgic throwbacks but on the vanguard. Chestnut has toured extensively as a member of Timeline, a jazz quartet led by revered pianist Geri Allen. And yet when he appeared with someone else’s band at a jazz festival recently and suggested to the festival director that he return with his own band, the director said that tap dancers were welcome only if “the artist” — the headlining horn player or vocalist — hired them.

“The artist?” Chestnut recalled thinking. “I’m an artist, too.”

“That was the norm,” Lerman said, when told that story. “But it’s not my norm anymore.”

Next year, Lerman’s band will perform at the august Newport Jazz Festival, where no tap dancer other than Savion Glover has led a band. Also in 2020, she’ll be at the prestigious Umbria Jazz Festival as an artist-in-residence, a first for a tap dancer.

At the festival in White Plains, it was sometimes hard to hear her. But in her featured spots, as when she and the keyboardist agilely jumped around a century of jazz history, the crowd went wild. Still, the rarer achievement was the more ordinary-looking one: Lerman up there with the others, just another musician in the band.

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