NEWARK — “What does the sound look like that you see when you are listening?”

This is how Savion Glover, the master tap dancer, talks about tap. Late last week, he was at Newark Symphony Hall here, in his hometown, preparing a new show — it runs July 2-7 at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan, his first appearance there since 2014 — and his post-rehearsal explanations kept coming out like Zen meditations: “Do you hear what you see? Or do you see what you hear?”

Mr. Glover, 45, has been saying things like this for decades. Usually, it’s to help audiences respond to his dance as music, an effect he achieves more in directly in performance.

Consider his appearance at the Blue Note Jazz Club in Greenwich Village last week, a kind of gig he does periodically. What you could see there was Mr. Glover on a small, amplified wooden stage, accompanied by a saxophonist and a drummer.

His bearded face, framed by dreadlocks, is a little more gaunt than it once was. His body and how he moves it have grown leaner. Palms up or floating heavenward, he could look like a man in prayer. Crouched, arms swinging, he could resemble a dancer from a West African tradition. Often, his movement looked like a hazy memory of dancing, or a ghost.