Remembering the art and energy of tap dance legend Maurice Hines

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Geoff Bennett: A legend of tap dance for seven decades has died.

Maurice Hines gained fame with his brother Gregory as the Hines Brothers, delighting audiences on stage, television, and film.

Jeffrey Brown has our remembrance as part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown : The art, the energy, the sheer joy of their movement.

Maurice and younger brother Gregory Hines helped revitalize and bring tap back to the forefront of popular culture. They began dancing as young children in Harlem, gained a large following through TV appearances and on stage, and starred in the 1984 Francis Ford Coppola film “Cotton Club.” The film was a nod to an earlier part of the tap tradition, including one famed model for the Hines Brothers, the Nicholas Brothers.

Intent on continuing that tradition, Gregory Hines would become a mentor to contemporary tap phenom Savion Glover. And Maurice Hines took that role seriously as well. We met him in 2010, when he was 66 and working with young dancers on a new production of “Sophisticated Ladies,” a review based on the life of Duke Ellington, at Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Theatre.

Two high school brothers, John and Leo Manzari, now well-respected professional tappers in their own right, caught his attention.

What does a good tap dancer have to have?

Maurice Hines, Dancer: Well, first of all, they have great feet. And they’re improvisational. And that’s what my brother was.

And so they can do anything that I want them to do, anything. And, also, they have the one thing. They love dancing together, like Greg and I did. And they have the one thing that you’re either born with. You cannot make it. You cannot hype it up. Either you have charisma or you don’t. And they have it. Gregory and I had it. They have it.

Jeffrey Brown : Gregory Hines died of cancer at age 57 in 2003. Maurice Hines continued to dance, performing on tour as recently as 2019. He died last Friday at age 80.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown .