❤ Jamming isn’t just an integral part of tap culture–it’s how the art form was born, by participating in spontaneous music-making and artistic expression. From the 1920s through the 1940s, the back room of a pool hall in Harlem, New York, was known as the “Hoofers Club.” Black tap dancers such as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Charles “Honi” Coles, and John Bubbles would gather to improvise, hone their craft, and get inspiration from each other’s steps. Today, tap jams are staples at tap festivals worldwide, and are occasionally organized at jazz clubs and dance studios by dancers eager for creative exchange and community-building. You might also hear them called jam sessions, cyphers, or improv circles, and some tap dancers refer to jams simply as shedding. A lot of tap jams have a live jazz trio playing the tunes, but there are plenty of jams with recorded music.

❤ The time step can be traced back to the vaudeville era in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was used as the introduction to improvisations. Dancers would repeat the time step, usually for six measures of music, and then perform two measures of improvised steps choreographed in the moment. The time step reached a peak in popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, when tap dancers began performing with large orchestras and needed a way to communicate tempo to the musicians. Most contemporary tap dancers use recorded music, so today the time step is rarely used to set tempo, but the step still retains the same basic principles upon which it was built, consisting most frequently of two measures, repeated three times.