Length: 10 minutes
In the summer of 2000, I traveled to Chicago to attend the Jump Rhythm Jazz Project Intensive at Northwestern University. I then saw the company perform at the Annenberg Center in the Spring of 2000, and after that show, I was hooked on jazz tap. I didn’t realize at the time that one of the co-founders, Jeannie Hill, was a foundational company member of Manhattan Tap. About ten years after this, I would make my way to New York to meet Heather Cornell, where all roads seem to lead, if you are seeking the deepest origins of jazz tap.
Photo by Anthony Dean.
Length: 10 minutes
TSOP, as a song and as a musical genre born in Philadelphia, was unlike anything else anyone had heard. The sound of Philadelphia, in the tap dance sense, is, also, unlike anything else you have heard. It’s a wall of sound. The concepts formed my early sound and still sometimes inform my sound: straight eighth notes and double time feel. I wanted to create a piece that honored my early immersion in street hoofin but was decidedly my voice. The first iteration of this piece was accompanied by Murmuration, an experimental improv string trio. Every version after that was a cappella.
Length: 30 minutes
A solo work for one dancer that fuses free improvised tap dance and short poems that meditate about time, loss and the silence peculiar to the female. The piece was re-mounted during the 2020 quarantine for Warp Factor 9 and the SoLow Festival. Accompanied by Joshua Machiz on double bass and pedal loop at every go-round.
Photo by Anthony Dean.
Length: 10 minutes
Sentimental or romantic? I’m definitely both, and I’m also a cynic. The concept of dancing as the only solution to most of life’s problems led me to Jitterbug Waltz, as a duet, with a full rhythm section, and sometimes with vocals. This piece was a part of a larger show about time signatures that premiered at Rittenhouse Soundworks and then traveled to the Barnes Foundation in 2017.
Photo by Anthony Dean.
Jill Jawn/Down to the Wire (2016)
Length: 10 minutes
Can there be a repertoire by a Philadelphia girl of a certain age that doesn’t have a Jill Scott tune in it? This Philadelphia girl of a certain age says no. A piece that first swims in the space between jazz and hip hop, often with the hippest female vocals (Dena Underwood, Lee Mo), the second half ends with the funk, testing how those grooves can travel in space.
Photo by Anthony Dean. Our favorite performances of this were done outside in the Philadelphia elements.
Length: 60 minutes
Tap Shoe Blues is an original jazz composition that I made while I was fooling around in my first studio at 1525 North Bailey Street. It’s also now a Philadelphia Real Book standard. In the first 2017 iteration, I played around with the 12-bar song and the idea of “threes.”
Interspersed with TSB were other blues standards from the swing, bebop and post-bebop eras, like Ahmad’s Blues, Blues for Norman, Splanky, Mohawk and Blues in F. The first 20 minutes of this piece premiered at the Barnes Foundation in April 2017, then the full-length version traveled to Rittenhouse Soundworks in June 2017 and then toured to Dixon Place for 8 in Show in September 2017.
Photo by Peter Yesley.
RHYTHM AND BLUES AND SHOES (2017-2019)
Rhythm & Blues & Shoes is a 60-minute suite of choreography and music that takes a leap into the music and history of bebop and blues from 1945 into the mid-1960s. Bebop drummers like Kenny Clarke, Philly Joe Jones and Art Blakey, (many of whom started out tap dancing), took inspiration for many of their complex licks and riffs from hoofers. As jazz and specifically, jazz drumming, got more complicated, tap dancers found ways to innovate their own music and continue the conversation of jazz and tap dance. The piece featured by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Horace Silver, McCoy Tyner and the original composition, “Tap Shoe Blues,” by Pamela Hetherington.
Choreography, arrangements and direction: Pamela Hetherington
Music directors: Jon Katz, Erica Corbo
Accompaniment by the Jon Katz Quartet (Jon Katz-saxophone, James Santangelo-piano, Nicholas Krolak-bass, Gusten Rudolph-drums, Khary Shaheed - drums, David Underwood-vocals).
Set List
Blues for Norman, C-Jam Blues, Splanky, Night Train, Tap Shoe Blues, Ahmad’s Blues, Tricrotism, Mohawk, Sister Sadie, Passion Dance
Performances
Premiere: The Barnes Foundation: April 2017
Concert Evenings: Rittenhouse Soundworks, Philadelphia, PA, June 1-2, 2017
Invitation to Stam-Pede/APAP: Symphony Space, New York, NY January 2019
“You need to work on beginnings and endings,” said Heather Cornell. So, when the opportunity to distill a 15 minute section for Stam-Pede arose, I took that as my challenge. Beginnings and endings. The short version that is driven by threes - three people, three songs, dividing a blues form into three, three circles. It is also inspired by the Live in Denmark concert by the trio of Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen, where they deliver the most crystalline, most swinging music that truly has no beginning or end, it’s just infinite.
DESTINATION DOWNBEAT/A MONTH OF SUNDAYS (2019-2020)
Destination Downbeat is a 60 minute concept piece that examines groove, timing, time signature, melody, rhythm and sound through the interplay of four dancers and three jazz musicians. It was performed five separate occasions at Sherrie Maricle’s jazz music performance space, Drummers, in East Kensington. With a small stage and a close-knit audience right at one’s feet, the concert was centered around the sound.
Choreography & musical arrangements by Pamela Hetherington
Piano/Voice/Music Direction: Erica Corbo, Bass: Nick Krolak, Trumpet: Paul Giess, Drums: Erica Mack (June 2019), Voice: V. Shayne Frederick (June 2019)
Set List
Moanin’ (Mingus + Art Blakey), Freedom Jazz Dance, On a Clear Day, Jitterbug Waltz, The Sound of Philadelphia, various band interludes that changed night to night
REVIEW: The Time of Your Life by Kat J. Sullivan
This piece was reimagined for the livestream during four Sundays in September 2020.
REVIEW: by Whitney Weinstein