Body slaps, high kicks, and costumes that looked like bathing suits.

Body slaps, high kicks, and costumes that looked like bathing suits. JOE LAMBERT

There’s no real consensus about where the “black bottom” started: New Orleans, Nashville, and Detroit have all laid claim to the jazz dance. Musician and dancer Perry Bradford said he invented it in the early 1900s, based on a dance affiliated with “rounders” (pimps) in Jacksonville, Florida. Some say its fundamental gestures—two-footed slides, shaking the hips, slapping the body—originated in Africa. Wherever the dance came from, it sprang up at the Century Ballroom last Sunday night in a five-minute performance by dance group Sister Kate during the final evening of Seattle’s annual Lindy Exchange…

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....