The Nicholas Brothers were two of the greatest dancers of the 20th century. Self taught in the black vaudeville theatres of Philadelphia, they combined rhythmic tap with acrobatic tumbling and balletic grace. They performed breath-taking leaps, spine-tingling vaults, heart-stopping flips, skips and spins. They made jazz and swing music visible. They were style, charm and elegance personified - pure unadulterated joy.

Fayard and Harold Nicholas were born in 1914 and 1921 respectively. They grew up in Philadelphia where their parents led the orchestra at the Standard Theater, their mother at the piano and father on drums.

When Fayard was a baby, his mum would take him to the theatre in a bassinet.

‘She would set me right beside the piano… as she was playing and my dad was playing and the rest of the orchestra. So that’s how I got rhythm.’

Fayard became an avid student of the vaudeville acts that he saw at the Standard. Using the small family apartment as his studio, he set about teaching his younger brother Harold the dance steps he had observed on stage.

‘I was showing him a step and he was having trouble getting this step. And I said “Listen, we’ll do it tomorrow. I see you’re having a little trouble now.” He said, ”No. No. I want to do it now.”’

Their father also took an active interest in their developing talent and gave Fayard some valuable advice.

‘Son, what you’re doing, it’s great. I like it. But don’t do what the other dancers do. Do your own thing… Listen. When you’re performing, don’t look at your feet. Look at that audience - because you’re entertaining them, not yourself.’

Fayard and Harold put their father’s guidance into practice, performing at the Standard as the Nicholas Brothers. Soon they were dancing in theatres around Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Baltimore.

'We were tap-dancers, but we put more style into it, more bodywork instead of just footwork.’

In 1932, when Fayard was 18 and Harold was 11, the Nicholas Brothers were signed as a featured act at Harlem's Cotton Club, appearing onstage alongside the likes of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington.

In pristine tuxedos and with brilliantined hair, the Nicholas Brothers spin and skip, twist and turn, slip and slide. Fearless and joyful, they dance on tables and up walls; summersault and do the splits. Their bodies float, their arms fly - with effortless elegance. They’re all high jumps and wide kicks. They levitate. Their act is punctuated with comic flourishes. They click their fingers, clap and adjust their bow ties. Holding a handkerchief between both hands, they skip straight over it. It’s physical poetry.

In 1936 producer Samuel Goldwyn commissioned the brothers to appear in ‘Kid Millions’, which became the first in a series of Hollywood movies. In 1940 Fayard and Harold moved to LA and for several decades they divided their time between films, clubs and concerts, Broadway, television and tours of Latin America, Africa, and Europe.

Fayard: We did vaudeville, we did nightclubs, we did movies, we did television. We have done everything in show business except opera.
Harold: Did you ever want to do opera?
Fayard: Oh, yes, I’d do a tap dance in opera and sing ‘O Sole Mio.’
Harold: A tap dance in opera?

Inevitably the Nicholas Brothers’ careers were constrained by the racism of the times. At the Cotton Club they performed in front of entirely white audiences and they would only be invited to join the clientele after the show because they were so young. Their appearances in movies were also limited to short isolated sections of so-called ‘flash dancing.’ They were never given character parts and were rarely allowed to sing.

'They weren't writing dialogue for blacks unless they were chauffeurs, maids or something like that... We were never written into the script. They just didn't know how.'

The actor and dancer Maurice Hines sums up the injustice:

‘Imagine what the Nicholas Brothers could have done if they had the opportunity. Oh, it’s frightening. But maybe that’s why they weren’t given the opportunity.’

The Nicholas Brothers’ most celebrated dance sequence is in the finale of the 1943 movie ‘Stormy Weather’ (which starred that other legendary dancer Bill Robinson, Bojangles).

Cab Calloway has been performing ‘Jumpin' Jive’ with his orchestra. Fayard and Harold, dressed in immaculate tails, leap up onto a table, exchange a few phrases with Calloway and take over. They swing with the rhythm, skip exuberantly across the orchestra's music stands and strut on top of a grand piano in call and response with the pianist. They leapfrog down an oversized flight of stairs, completing each step with a split. And they rise from each split without using their hands.

Blimey. And it’s all filmed in one shot without cuts or edits.

I read somewhere the Nicholas Brothers characterised as ‘syncopated dancers.’ Their dancing is not neat and uniform. Rather it is complex and asymmetric. They dance in and around the beat. They each retain their individuality.

I’m no music scholar, but I’ve always liked the idea of syncopation: the thought that dance music in particular gets its intoxicating swing from an interrupted rhythm, a broken regularity, an out-of-place stress or accent. On BBC Radio 3 recently the writer Tom Service described syncopation as the slight calculated violation of what would otherwise be a metronome’s mechanical beat.

Imagine a Syncopated Business: moving in time, in rhythm, as one - but propelled by deviation and displacement, gaining its essential groove from deliberate disruption of conventional patterns, from changes in stress and emphasis. That for me is the very definition of a successful creative organisation.

The Nicholas Brothers had a 60-year career, performing on stage, in film and television well into the 1990s. Harold died in 2000 and then Fayard followed him in 2006. You can see a celebration of their remarkable talent in the 1992 documentary 'We Sing and We Dance.'

The film features a charming illustration of their very special relationship:

Fayard: I was speaking for both of us.
Harold: You have to speak for yourself… And then I speak for myself… But that doesn’t mean that we’re not still brothers.

'Lucky number.
Dreaming of lucky numbers.
Hoping that those lucky numbers will show for me,
Numbers gonna show for you and me.’
The Nicholas Brothers, 'Lucky Number’ (The Black Network)

No. 315