Album: Footprints

Tap dancers are both dancers and musicians and tap dance has always been a part of jazz music. This is common knowledge. What’s unique about this album is our uncommon approach: allowing tap, without its visual component, to function as an independent, percussive voice in jazz—in other words, tap dance without the dance. This idea could be realized with Jan Roder (bass) and Patrick Bebelaar (piano). We share a musical understanding and openness to exploring tap as an instrument within improvisational interplay. Jazz standards and Bebelaar’s compositions merge with free improvisations — tap in an avant-garde sense, yet deeply rooted in the tradition of jazz.