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There’s a scene in Toni Morrison’s novel “Jazz,” the 1992 work of historical fiction set in the Harlem Renaissance, in which young musicians play a tune on a rooftop in Harlem. As the music floats down to Lenox Avenue, people stop in their tracks to appreciate the sound emanating from above.
“It was just like the light of that day, pure and steady and kind of kind,” Morrison wrote. “I could hear the men playing out their maple-sugar hearts, tapping it from four-hundred-year-old trees and letting it run down the trunk.”
That scene served as inspiration for the photographer Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. when he photographed eight dancers in a New York Times studio this summer. He chose a vibrant yellow for the backdrop.
“It’s very Harlem,” said Brown, who, at the time of the photo shoot, lived on the same block in Harlem as one of the dancers. He added that Morrison’s “description of the sound, as tapped from the sap of their hearts, brings to mind that amber molasses glow that, to me, colors the lore of Harlem.”
Those dancers are featured in an article about three modern-day choreographers who are carrying forward a legacy of Black dance that flourished a century ago during the Harlem Renaissance.
LaTasha Barnes melds Lindy Hop with hip-hop and house in her show “The Jazz Continuum.” Ayodele Casel, who in 2021 was featured on a Forever stamp commemorating the history of tap dance in America, brings her own style and flair to techniques pioneered by Renaissance-era showmen like John Bubbles and Bill Robinson. And Camille A. Brown infuses Broadway shows, including the Alicia Keys jukebox musical “Hell’s Kitchen,” with the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of Katherine Dunham and the vocal clarity of Ella Fitzgerald.
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