By Suzanne Trimel

The legendary Broadway and Motown choreographer Cholly Atkins, winner of a Tony for the musical "Black and Blue" and choreographer for top Motown groups like the Temptations and the Supremes, will highlight a program on jazz and dance on Tuesday, March 21 at Columbia. Atkins will discuss and demonstrate jazz music and movement in a conversation with dancer Marion Coles and dance historian Jacqui Malone, beginning at 8 P.M. in 301 Philosophy Hall.

The program, "Jazz Music in Motion: Dancers and Big Bands," is the third lecture/performance in the Center for Jazz Studies inaugural 2000 series on jazz. The program is free and open to the public.

As a choreographer for Motown, Atkins has directed, staged and choreographed some of the most popular performers of the last 35 years, including the Temptations, the Supremes, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, the O'Jays, and the Cadillacs. He has won several awards for his contribution to the "class act" tradition in American tap dance; numerous gold records for his vocal choreography: and a 1989 Tony Award for his choreography in the Broadway musical, Black and Blue.

During the 1940's, he and tap dancer, Charles "Honi" Coles, toured as a "class act" duo with Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, and Billy Eckstine. Coles and Atkins also appeared in the Broadway musical, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." In 1993, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a three-year Choreographer's Fellowship to record his memoirs and to tour American colleges and universities teaching vocal choreography as a dance genre. He is working with Malone, a faculty member at Queens College, on his autobiography, to be titled Class Act.

Malone, a former member of the Eleo Pomare Dance Company, is the author of Steppin' on the Blues (1996).

The conversation will focus on the historical link between jazz and dance. New Orleans and Mobile, Ala. marching band players, for example, drew rhythms, melodic phrases, and other musical ideas from their dance-marching fellows. Jazz players studied and responded to the moves of dancers in a multitude of settings where they played together; musicians learned from chorus-line dancers, floor-show steppers, partying jitterbugs bumping and jumping with the music, and especially, tap dance performers, the best of whom could provide complex foot-drum rhythms and choruses as if they were members of the jazz bands with which they performed.

In a dance career spanning more than half a century, Marion Coles was a lead dancer in the chorus line of the Apollo Theater and appeared with Jimmy Lunceford, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Count Basie. From 1980 to 1986, she was a member of Jane Goldberg's Changing Times Tap Company. Since 1986, she has performed with and served as Artistic Director of the Silver Belles, a group of former chorus line dancers who worked at the Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club when Harlem was a mainstay of New York night life. Ms. Coles has taught master classes at New York University and Queens College.

The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia is the first academic center in the United States dedicated to exploring the interaction between jazz and American culture. The interdisciplinary center was opened in September 1999 with $300,000 in funding from the Ford Foundation. Its founder and director, Professor Robert O'Meally, is a leading interpreter of the dynamics of jazz in American culture. A literary scholar, he holds the Zora Neale Hurston Professorship of American Literature and is the author of Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday and The Craft of Ralph Ellison. O'Meally is the editor of a seminal textbook for jazz studies, The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, and was nominated for a Grammy award last year as co-producer of a The Jazz Singers: A Smithsonian Collection.