“JAZZ IS A SELF-TAUGHT ART AND I AM A LONER” - Mary Lou Williams

This work of telling other people’s stories inevitably reveals facets of my own journey in dance and music. I start researching, and the stuff I find is just a portal into my own experiences; perhaps that is why I am drawn to them, or why they are drawn to me. My first jazz story about McCoy Tyner and Bobby Timmons led me to a Philadelphia Jazz Project commission, in a drained swimming pool, where I used two spirituals, Wade in the Water and Deep River, to tell stories about a refugee, a domestic abuse survivor and a child who couldn’t swim, all escaping through water to safety. Then, Creative Philadelphia commissioned me to create a piece about women in jazz, so I decided to tackle the story of Terry Pollard. Terry’s story is one of countless examples, in which a woman musician’s prodigious and stunning body of work is diminished - in Terry’s case, by motherhood - and is reductively described in the history as “overlooked”  or “unappreciated.” While I was researching Terry, another woman contemporary’s name came up several times - Beryl Booker - and I was chastened to learn that Beryl was a Philadelphian and she slayed the jazz game up, down and sideways, for decades. As the piece took shape, I became interested in Beryl’s 1954 European tour with Billie Holiday, during which Beryl played with the Buddy DeFranco Quartet. But, Beryl wasn’t a named part of the quartet; she was the ‘second’ piano player after Sonny Clark. It took some digging to discover that Sonny took the first solo, and Beryl took the second solo, in the extant recordings. Thinking about how she expressed her voice, in small spaces that she had to carve out for herself, made me reflect upon my own journey learning how to sit in at jazz jams as a female tap dancer in Philadelphia. The music used in the performance of this jazz story used the compositions of Beryl Booker, Mary Lou Williams and Geri Allen and was performed one night only at the 2024 Cannonball Festival in Philadelphia, along with Maria Marmarou (d), Emmy Rota (b) and Deb Smith (tpt).

***

When I went to my first jazz jam at LaRose Jazz Club on Germantown Avenue, I knew your basic tap dance tunes like “All of Me” and “Cute” but no Bird, no Trane. So, the first thing I did in the early weeks was pretend like I knew everything about what I was hearing, but secretly, I was writing down all of these song titles, long lists, and then I would spend the rest of the week looking up as many versions as I could of each on YouTube. I also watched what everyone did and said. My teacher, Heather Cornell, had given me the basics of how to call a tune, but at this jam, I couldn’t discern a rhyme or reason as to who got called, and the order of who played or who didn’t, although it was obvious that some musicians had more sovereignty than others. I also did not ask questions. I sat in a corner and wrote in my notebook for the entire three hours, because even though I signed the sheet every week as “tap dancer,” my name was passed over and I wasn’t called up, for at least two months.

On the night I was first called up for a tune, I placed my physical body somewhere between the drums and the bass and my mind somewhere into a blinding dimension of thought I had never visited before. I sweated so much from the effort of staying upright that when I came off the floor, I looked like I’d been in a street fight.  But I kept coming back, every week, kept learning more tunes and how to hang, people got to know me, and after six months or so, I graduated from doing a solo or trades near the end of the tune, to getting one feature tune, and then, I got to call two tunes. I began to feel at home in this weekly check-in, where I slowly learned the the music and the sit-in rules - each new pass-through akin to receiving a tiny, surprise gift, dropped in my lap.

If and when I was called up, I entered the ring as a nobody with an instrument that belonged nowhere: not first solo, last solo or even trades. Like Heather taught me, I made a principal effort to connect with the band. However, smiling widely, shaking hands, and offering profusive gratitude, didn’t work on most of the folks I met. Cats usually played loudly over my solo, so from the audience, I looked crazy out of place, on mute, hopping up and down on the little dance floor, for no reason at all. Worse, though, was when I was made invisible: meaning, I would stand on the bandstand for long minutes, wait for my turn in the order, and never dance. Rob Henderson, a wonderful human and legendary drummer, ran a great jam at LaRose, but the underlying oppositional vibe was unavoidable. At that jam in particular, people wanted to get in, get their solo, throw down, and then bounce. And this was before the age of social media; it was just about getting the air time. 

I was a raw little jazz roast cooking away in this jammy-jam stew pot. I developed a sound and a point of view from holding my own amongst all of these incredible Philly musicians but at the expense of adopting a rather edgy way of communicating. I could argue that I was simply becoming a product of the environment, but to be honest, my tone and mannerisms that I leaned into on the bandstand were just an amplification of my own tendencies and triggers. Defensiveness was my default. I inherited my family DNA, which includes four generations of Philly, (say no more). I also watched my Northeast Philly neighbors, grade school teachers, people at the Acme and the El station, get ‘up in arms’ about literally anything and nothing, for my entire life. Jawing is the manner of speaking. In those early days of baby jazz Pam, if I was in a situation where I could go off, you could count on me to weigh in. I always had an excuse at the ready for why I was justified to be generally irked. In fact, Heather said to me once, Oracle-like, “Honi Coles was from Philly.” As if to explain to herself and others around me the way I showed up in the room, because he was a known touchy communicator with a hairline trigger.

I was young, prickly and determined not to look like a punk; at the same time, I was scared shitless every time I took the floor. Left mostly unchecked, except when I’d get cut off or not called up, these two things were my only introduction to jam boundaries. Two years into my weekly hang at LaRose, I found myself at a tap festival with Heather, sitting next to her at a table, about to sit in. I wanted to make her proud; I also wanted to fluff my ego a bit, because I felt like I had been working so hard in the ring, learning how to jam ‘for real.’ This was a different jam from the jump, in that each tap dancer at the festival had a chance to call a feature tune and set the arrangement. With it being so tap dancer focused, the evening diverged from the jazz jam set-up, like I had been attending at LaRose, where a tune is called and every instrumentalist in the lineup gets to solo. I decided that calling “Green Chimneys” would show how hip and jazz-mature I was, and I called the tune like I would have in Philly. But we weren’t in Philly, we were on an island in Greece, and either 1) the musicians didn't know the tune all that well, or 2) they just didn't want to play it that night, or 3) my cocky as hell attitude turned them all the way off. Spoiler alert: it was a mix of (2) and (3).

So, they said,

“Could you please pick another tune?”

The Philly chip on my shoulder clipped in hard.

“Oh, you don't know it? It's a Thelonious Monk tune, right?”

They both exchange side-eye glances, but I don’t get it. I really wanted to dance to Green Chimneys, so I repeated the name of the tune again, thinking maybe they didn’t hear me. But when they declined again, I picked another ‘easier’ tap tune that I blew off as too straight-ahead. The song came and went, and I sucked. Blaming the song choice and not myself, I sat down alone at a separate table from the tap group, hoping now that Heather had somehow not seen or heard any of that. After long minutes, she says:

“Um. What the fuck was that?”

…

I bristled and also felt deep shame at not doing my best. That wasn’t my tune. I didn’t want to dance to that tune in the first place.

Turning her eyes towards me, she says,

“You need to talk to the musicians.”

Talk to the musicians? The thought of the musicians commenting on my piss-poor dancing sprung hot, humiliated tears flood to my eyes. Hoping to hide behind the proverbial apron, I bide time: 

“What did I do?”

…

“What did I do?”

…

“I don't even know what to ask them. Like, what did I do?”

…

I am now weeping at this perfectly gorgeous restaurant in Greece, where the sun is now setting into orange-red pinks over the Ionian Sea. Heather isn’t phased by my hysterics.

“You can't speak to musicians like that. They are very, very offended and so am I.” 

I was mortified that I had done something wrong, when being wrong was the last thing I wanted to be, ever. (#philly). So, I denied. Now, I may not know how to tap dance very well, but I know how to act at a jam, at least. I had been in the trenches for two years, FFS! Here they came, the excuses, spilling mad over my tears.

1) “But, how could they have been offended? I just asked for a tune.” 

2) “I feel like I was just speaking how I would speak at the jam where I usually go. You know, the one I go to in Philly. You have to act a certain way to get yourself in.”

3) It’s Philly. People are just like that there, at the jams, you don’t understand.”

Heather doesn’t shift a muscle and by now, a few of my friends have gone up and sat in, and I’ve missed them all. After some time, when it became clear I wasn’t going to do it myself, Heather led me over to the musicians and sits in a circle with them, facing me. They confirm:

“We were quite offended by how you spoke to us.”

Again, I wish I could say that defensiveness and denial weren’t my default responses in that moment.

It took me a great deal of time, practice and experimentation in the music to peel away the parts of me that fought like hell to avoid responsibility and to sit in the fine complexities of self-awareness. After many more years, I learned how to craft a space on the bandstand for myself, through listening instead of fear. And those of us who have walked this journey know, that’s where the joy of this work lives, when you play with other people who love the music and just want to have a damn good conversation. That conversation may take twists and turns into unknown places, but it is ultimately centered on kind agreements of time, space, groove and mutual respect.

It’s been about fifteen years since that first jam at LaRose Jazz Club. Sitting in at jams is a primary way in which I express myself and I enjoy it immensely, but lately, I have accepted that my journey may take me elsewhere. Tap dance in America is another jammy-jam stew pot full of folks who come into the art form from all sides and entry points, creating their own spaces and techniques and musical sounds, and it’s a privilege to witness it all. Being an improvisor, who uses a variety of mediums in my work, at times my voice feels like it hones in to the ‘tap scene,’ and at other times, I feel completely separated from what it is now and where I see it going. I grapple with wanting to fit in but another tiny beautiful gift that jazz music has given me is, I can’t not be original. And for better or worse, I can’t not be myself. With or without shoes.