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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