Soul 'trane

Savion Glover claims he doesn’t do anything special to take care of his feet.

“I don’t know, every once in a while I get my feet rubbed,” he says nonchalantly. “I make sure I have the freshest pair of Michael Jordans, but I don’t have a podiatrist or special guy or nuthin’ like that.”

Considering Glover’s feet have been the most written-about soles on Broadway in the last few decades, his blasé attitude about them is like that of a guy who drives a Ferrari without insurance. Glover, who started tapping on Broadway when he was ten, and at age 24 won a Tony for choreographing Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk, may have been the guy who fused guerrilla hip-hop moves with Great White Way glamour. But for all his high-impact tapping, his offstage attitude about his work is fairly mellow, something of an antistomp.

This where-the-wind-blows-him demeanor is what brought him to his latest side project. If Trane Wuz Here, a three-person jam session consisting of Glover’s moves, performance poet reg e gaines’s words and saxophonist Matana Roberts’s improvised riffs, celebrates jazz giant John Coltrane. It’s been knocking around since 2004, and the show makes a one-week stop at Theatre Building Chicago on a Black History Month tour.

Trane is performed in the free style that marked the controversial last five years of ’Trane’s life and career, when, influenced by Buddhism, Coltrane’s experimental riffs became long, occasionally discordant and unpredictable. Using Glover’s tapping as percussion (“His feet are like drums at the ends of his legs,” Roberts says) and gaines’s unscripted words as a bass line, the show leaves no paper trail, but instead evokes the quality of an improv-jazz trio. “Oftentimes, I have no idea what has happened once it’s over,” Roberts says.

The group-created show is a genreless jam (Glover calls it “a meditation”); it’s not really theater, not technically dance, not quite slam poetry and truthfully can’t be called jazz. Yet it’s all of these things at once—an event that might leave critics scratching their heads about how to classify it, but also one that invites audiences of all the genres it brushes up against.

Not that Glover has any delusions about his audiences. Having appeared in four Broadway shows, all of which featured mainly black casts and music by African-American songwriters, Glover is still used to looking out into the house and seeing a mostly white crowd.

“I don’t think we have touched the capacity of what we can bring to the theater,” Glover says. “Because that’s just not us. I don’t care what the show is. They did a [remount] of Raisin in the Sun [with Sean “P. Diddy” Combs]. But I don’t think our young people were in there. [The producers] thought, Oh, we’re gonna get Puffy in here; we’re gonna get black people into the theater. But that’s just not us.”

For gaines, the lowercased legend of the spoken-word and slam-poetry scene of the ’90s, his first encounter with a classic American musical echoes that sentiment. “I remember taking a class trip to see the movie The Sound of Music,” the 51-year-old Jersey City, New Jersey, native recalls. “And we had to write about it afterward. And I wrote about how mad I was that this white lady stole John Coltrane’s song.” That song, of course, was “My Favorite Things,” which Coltrane famously made his own on his album of the same name.

Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics are a far cry from the kind of words gaines would eventually come to write. A veteran of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (an NYC East Village institution) and an early champion of the National Poetry Slam, gaines helped bust slam poetry into mainstream consciousness by performing his poem “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans” (about a young man who kills another for his sneakers) on MTV Unplugged and making subsequent appearances on The Arsenio Hall Show. Eventually gaines made his own notable contribution to musical theater, writing the book for Glover’s Noise/Funk. While he never knows where his words will go each night in Trane, the subject of Coltrane’s unrestricted journey through jazz (and the technical boundaries he had overcome to take it) are usually the starting point.

While Glover and gaines have collaborated for more than a decade, Roberts only joined the team a few years ago. A Chicago native residing in New York (she counts among her mentors South Side jazz legend Von Freeman), Roberts fell into the side gig in the typically unpredictable style of a jazz artist: gaines first saw her performing with the Bowery Improv Poets. (“I’ll basically take any gig I can get in this town,” Roberts says.) He drafted her for a play he was working on, and casually passed her number to Glover.

“And then suddenly I got a call from Savion, asking me to come play a gig with him in Midtown,” Roberts says. “I’m not usually starstruck at all, but that was crazy.”

The improv jams that organically resulted out of that recreate Coltrane’s creative journey. All three artists were raised by jazz lovers, and knew his oeuvre from an early age. The show includes “My Favorite Things” and another ’Trane standard, “A Love Supreme,” as well as free-associated numbers many Coltrane fans at the time found off-putting.

“I don’t consider this something we should do on Broadway,” Glover says, “and I don’t expect it to be something that critics understand. I know I’m up here dancing, but we’re a band.”

If Trane Wuz Here begins on Tuesday 14.