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The "Dancing to Jazz" Video

Lupita and Bill Jackman
Dance to the Music of The Bill Jackman Trio

Bill was a "late bloomer" as a jazz pianist, but an "early bloomer" as a dancer. Many of our dance friends*, who have known him for years as a dancer, didn't even know he plays the piano. When they finally hear him play jazz piano, they are quite surprised and often say something like "I thought jazz musicians can't dance." (They sometimes qualify that some Latin, i.e., salsa, musicians can dance, but not "straight-ahead" jazz musicians.)

In an earlier era, jazz was associated with dancing but has become separated since the modern jazz era of the late 1940s and 1950s. Many current jazz musicians pay lip service to the idea that jazz should be danceable, but the tempos they select for their recordings belie their words.

Our goal in this project is to provide quality jazz piano trio music that you can dance to as well as listen to. To demonstrate that our music is danceable, we have done a dance video, entitled "Dancing to Jazz" to accompany our CDs. We selected six tunes (see below) - two Latin, two swing, and two ballads - from the 45 tunes Bill's Trio recorded. In this video, we show that 1.) you can partner dance to jazz, 2.) that "straight-ahead" jazz musicians can dance, and 3.) that they can dance to the very music they have created.

Our "Dancing to Jazz" dance video is an historic first in the history of jazz: Prior to it, no jazz musician had ever danced with a partner to the very music he or she had created and recorded.

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(* By dancers, we mean knowing how to dance with a partner, which is what most people mean by "knowing how to dance." Anybody and everybody can go out on the dance floor and move around by themselves. The scores of people who go to dance studios to "learn how to dance" already can do that. They take dance lessons to learn how to dance with a partner.)

Lupita López Jackman