Broadway is the last place you would expect to find a celebration of the classical phase of a dying dance form, especially one whose most expressive effects are miniaturist and of a rhythmic complexity that requires close attention, not just visual but aural, from the audience. But in Black and Blue, Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli have succeeded double-handedly in rescuing tap dancing from the show-biz novelty into which it has largely declined, revealing it as the dazzlingly virtuoso and intensely personal kinetic and acoustic expression that it is—one whose long apprenticeship, strict discipline, and reverence for tradition bestow upon it and its practitioners the moral vigor of every classical art.

Of course, classical tap never actually disappeared; it merely went out of style. Its creators and guardians, now mostly elderly men, bided their time with the same forbearance with which they had endured the Jim Crow rules of Thirties and Forties Broadway and Hollywood. They also passed their art on to a handful of acolytes. Some of these were white female postmodern dancers who were fascinated with the possibilities of classical tap as the basis for a new dance style. Music was a stumbling block, however; these dancers did not want their pieces to be exercises in nostalgia, but the music that best suited classical tap was no longer being written.

Of course, classical tap never actually disappeared; it merely went out of style.

Black and Bluecelebrates the original music of the jazz