In 2021, my first jazz story about McCoy Tyner and Bobby Timmons, which I created for a live broadcast on PhillyCAM, won me a phone call from the late, great Homer Jackson, who, a year later, gave me a wondrously expansive Philadelphia Jazz Project commission that I entitled “Trouble the Water.” Deep in the drained swimming pools at Fairmount Waterworks, this was the first time that I used many points of entry to weave together jazz music, text, and two spirituals, Wade in the Water and Deep River to tell the imagined stories of a refugee, a domestic abuse survivor and a child who couldn’t swim, all escaping through water to safety.
In 2023, Creative Philadelphia commissioned me to create a piece about women in jazz, and I decided to tell 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.” I did extensive research on Terry, her contemporaries, tap dance parallels and used my own experiences as a mother-artist to write a sound-text-music narrative that was performed in my third studio space at 1501 North 31st Street.
While I was researching Terry, another woman contemporary’s name , Beryl Booker, came up several times, and I was chastened to learn that Beryl was a Philadelphian and she slayed the jazz game up, down and sideways, for decades. How do we happen upon these names? How do they find us, in our own search? This work of telling other people’s stories inevitably reveals facets of my own journey in dance and music. The information I find is just a portal into my own experiences, perhaps that is why I am drawn to them, or they are. drawn to me.
For my fourth jazz story at the 2024 Cannonball Festival, I focused on Beryl’s 1954 European tour with Billie Holiday, during which time 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, and it took some serious digging to even find Beryl on the recordings, because Sonny took the first solo, and Beryl took the second solo —which I like to believe was extremely smart, on her part.. She definitely found her voice and place on the bandstand.
“JAZZ IS A SELF-TAUGHT ART, AND I AM A LONER.” — MARY LOU WILLIAMS
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 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 or make any friends. I sat in a corner, alone, 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 of 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.
Left mostly unchecked for those two years, except when I’d get cut off or not called up, these two things were my only introduction to jam boundaries.
In 2013, I was 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.
For better or worse, these kind of ‘tap jam’ set-ups gives the tap dancer a lot of freedom, in terms of how they compose the arrangement. I will say that tap dancers finding their voice usually end up taking the most solo time, they think they have to impress or fill up the entire space. Silence or knowing when to dance and not dance can be the scariest thing to confront. Because, let’s be honest, all of us have egos and want to show what we got, na’meen.
Where was I in the jam continuum? Let’s just say I didn’t know how to shut up yet.
So I got up there and 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, 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 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 hadn’t ever danced to, but I thought that I knew well enough. Turns out, I didn’t know it at all. 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 said:
“You need to talk to the musicians.”
There’s nothing like a veiled comment from the person you respect most to give you the kick in the ass you need. Even though I felt like I’d been through the wringer at jams in Philly, I’d actually had it easy.
Turning her eyes towards me again, she repeated:
“You need to talk to the musicians.”
Hoping to hide behind the proverbial apron, I bided my 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. Instead of facing the feedback, I attempted to defend myself. And, here they came, the excuses, spilling mad over my tears:
1) I know how to act at a jam, you taught me! I’ve been in the trenches for two years! Do you know how hard it’s been?2) “But, how could they have been offended? I just asked for a tune.” 3) “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.”4) It’s Philly. People are just like that there, at the jams, you don’t understand.”I sat there, in my own pathetic heap, for about an hour. My friends went up and sat in, and I missed them all. It gets quite cold on a Southern Greek island at night. It was my first time in Europe, it was also my first time away from my two young daughters, who were 6 and 4 at the time, and I hadn’t packed a jacket or sweater for the trip. Shivering, homesick, and questioning why I even tried to be a tap dancer, when I sucked as badly as I did, Heather led me over to the musicians and sat at a table with them, and me, all facing me.
The two musicians said:
“We were quite offended by how you spoke to us.”
And with that phrase, which then required an apology from me, regarding the way I chose not to give respect - that’s where my work as a jazz tap dancer began.
I was humiliated and discouraged. The absolute mountain of work I had to do to get better sat in front of me, and I had no idea where to begin. However, there was something stubborn inside of me that was determined to improve, and I knew I could, if I was willing to get over myself, get out of my own way, and accept hard truths.
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. I spent the years after that grinding and self-producing projects of all kinds: solo, group, odd stages, sometimes big stages. I built whole studios to contain my work and ideas.
Doing the work - actually, even knowing what the work was or needed to be - was akin to fitting together a 1000 piece puzzle and then realizing I was missing one key piece in the middle; then, breaking it all apart, starting all over, often taking years to search for the missing piece.
So many performances from that point forward were comically cringe-worthy and didn’t go right whatsoever. I became fascinated by how minutely specific I had to be about my work, approach, communication, personal practice and the craft of sitting in the present moment: fearless, open, no facade. I was grateful for the mistakes, because it meant it was one fewer time that I was going to suck.
It takes so much time. You want to get there quickly, you want to get just one answer but “it” remains out of reach, until you are ready. I had to grow up as a person, even to play this music. It isn’t about memorizing heads or having pocket steps at the ready, because that need to control the outcome is an energy of fear. And those of us who have walked this journey know, that’s where the joy of this work lives, when you relinquish control into the hands of everyone else, 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.
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, some solitary, some as collectives. And, it’s no secret, like jazz, tap dance is a male-dominated form, and the conversations told, (if you let them be told), are exclusionary. It is a challenge not to fall into the loud of it all, or feel as if being second in the solo order means something about one’s worthiness to contribute.
I love to research, write, sing, and dance without metal on my feet. Sometimes I do wear my tap shoes (Artefyls :-). I love clear sounds and pure, clean, unadulterated technique, which makes me different, really different, and I spend a lot of time alone. You have to be fine with being alone, in this art form.
I love going to jams and not dancing. I love it when I go to jams and the musician leading it sees me and says, Pam, tonight’s not a good night. That’s everything. Because you don’t want to play, just to play. A tiny beautiful gift that jazz music gave me, and took decades for me to receive is: I can’t not sound like myself. And for better or worse, I can’t not be myself. With or without shoes.