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Baby Laurence was considered one of the greatest of all tap dancers, and one whose close association with jazz gave him a strong reputation among jazz musicians. Recordings by tap dancers are relatively rare since the visual element is naturally missing. Dancemaster was Baby Laurence's only album under his own name and it gives one strong evidence as to his versatility and brilliance.
He was born Laurence Donald Jackson in 1921, growing up in Baltimore. He started in show business early in life and in 1933 when he was 12, he was singing with the McKinney's Cotton Pickers as a boy soprano. Don Redman liked what he heard him and took him on the road. During his first visit to New York, Laurence was very impressed by the tap dancers that he saw at the Hoofers Club. While practicing dancing and developing steps, he continued working as a singer including performing with the vocal group “The Four Buds.” By 1940 he was ready and his career changed from singing to dancing.
Unlike some of the other dancers, Baby Laurence was very comfortable in jazz settings, trading fours with horn players and drummers, and participating in after-hours jam sessions. In the 1940s he danced with the big bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Woody Herman, amazing audiences with both his wide variety of steps and the way that he naturally fit into jazz ensembles. He was influenced not only by other dancers but by such innovators as Charlie Parker, Art Tatum and Max Roach and during 1959-60, at the time that he recorded Dancemaster, he often worked with Charles Mingus.
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On this album, Baby Laurence is the star. He demonstrates just how fast his feet could tap while not functioning just as a rhythm instrument but like a horn, using dynamics, space and different patterns to build up solos. On the first half of the album he is part of a sextet also including tenor-saxophonist Paul Quinichette and drummer Osie Johnson while the remaining numbers match Baby in a quintet with Bobby Jaspar (on tenor and flute), pianist Roland Hanna and drummer Dave Pochonet. Among the highlights are “Baby At Birdland,” “The Sand,” “Whispering” (a recreation of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson's step dance) and the unaccompanied “Concerto In Taps.” In addition, Baby Laurence jams on a few standards such as “Moose The Mooche” and “Anthropology” (mistitled “Ornithology”).
Baby Laurence, who lived until 1973, only recorded this one album and it is definitely worth acquiring. (Scott Yanow)
"Baby Laurence is something else. 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. Ive seen him at Miltons and at other sessions sit in with a combo and become another instrument taking solos, trading breaks, building on motifs suggested by a previous hornman. As Whitney Balliett has observed in The New Yorker: Laurence is essentially a great drummer. Reviewing Baby with Charlie Mingus at the Showplace in New York, Balliett added: He did, in a matter of minutes, what celebrated workers like Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly had only dreamed of these many years. " -Nat Hentoff, 1961
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