WHERE DO YOU DANCE SANDMAN?
In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 film ‘The Cotton Club Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson, played smoothly by Laurence Fishburne advises tap dancer Gregory Hines, as Sandman Williams that the way to revenge against a racist stage manager is not with violence. Fishburne flows into a monolog about his character’s place in the world and that of Delbert ‘Sandman’ Williams, “There’s only two things in this world I have to do Sandman and one is to stay black and the other is to die… The white man ain’t left me nothing out here but the underworld. That is where I dance. Lemme ask you something Sandman? Where do you dance?”
After a moment of thought Hines replies, “I’m gonna kill him with my tap shoes” and they men drink a toast.
Even before Coppola re-edited the film for a 2019 re-issue and added scenes about the black characters he’d been forced to cut in ’84, ‘The Cotton Club’ was a favorite of mine, largely because of the glimmers of a better movie in the original cut. This scene with Fishburne and Hines always stayed with me. I’ve pondered the idea of where I danced many times since.
To embrace where you really dance requires a brutal honesty most of can’t muster. You really have to look at who you are and what your skill set is. We all have ideas about what we are good at, but few of us are really ready to deal with our faults, limitations, and liabilities. If you made a list of what your best qualities were and your worse, would be you be worried about which side was longer or would you go deep? Could you stand to ask your mate or your friends to evaluate you? Would they have to pull their punches because they knew you couldn’t stand the truth?
But life makes you do this self-examination. Transitions, from job to job, lover to lover, place to place, require an assessment. What are my skills? What do I need? Where are my opportunities? What has to be a priority? Who are your allies? Who are my enemies? From this process revelations are possible.
I’ve appeared in a lot of documentaries on music and culture. More people know me now more from those appearances than the writing that made the filmmakers reach out to me. But I’ve never sought a full-time career as an on camera host. The on camera jobs I’ve done have been offered to me. (The only exception being a doc I co-directed called Brooklyn Boheme, where I was part of the narrative.) While I think I am effective on camera in small doses talking about things I care passionately about, I knew I didn’t have the temperament or verbal skills to hold up on television as a host or reporter. If I didn’t really care about the subject I was gonna be bored and bad. For me to be any good on camera the subject had to excite for me to be animated.
Some of my favorite artistic masters understood their strengths and weaknesses, building careers that highlighted what they did best, limitations into style. Compared to Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz giants that preceded him as a trumpet star, Miles Davis was not a virtuoso. The high notes and showy bravado that defined so genius trumpet players was not something Miles could match, once he realized he didn’t have to.
Soulful, clean, romantic, sensitive, controlled and precise, Miles’ created a signature that even casual listeners could identify. Where bebop had been about a flurry of notes, Miles didn’t have to play as fast to touch souls. But that wasn’t all. Once his trumpet style was established, Miles spend much the rest of his career flowing from one musical setting to another, as restless in his arrangements as he was as stable in his style. Miles believed to change his sound he had to change his band, creating one of the greatest alumni groups in jazz history. Miles often changed the instrumentation around his trumpet, but his personal sound was as steady as a heartbeat. Miles pulled off the miracle of staying the same, while constantly changing. This ability to maintain your identity, while continuing to evolve, is a key to longevity.