http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/arts/michela-marino-lerman-and-others-tap-into-betty-carter.html 2014-10-09 00:48:18 Michela Marino Lerman and Others Tap Into Betty Carter Michela Marino Lerman, with two other dancers, a vocalist and a jazz trio, paid homage to Betty Carter. === Near midnight on Tuesday at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, three women tap-danced as the floor beneath them shifted. The dancing surface was three small wooden platforms. These were laid contiguously, but the force of footwork kept spreading them apart. The more challenging variable, though, was musical. For this was a tribute to the great and iconoclastic jazz singer The tribute, which continues through Saturday, was organized by one of the dancers, Michela Marino Lerman. In recent years, Ms. Lerman has shown admirable tenacity in getting herself booked into jazz clubs, a natural home for her art that bookers too rarely recognize as such. Since 2009, she has run a This week, she is joined by a nimble jazz trio (Takeshi Ohbayashi on piano, Alex Claffy on bass and Kyle Poole on drums), the captivating vocalist Though unfocused in parts, the opening-night set caught the right spirit, denying any conflict, as Carter did, between adventurous jazz and a rollicking party. The Bradley sisters sassed it up, spicing their adept and powerful tapping with lots of vernacular sauce. Of the two, Frances is the more ladylike, a little stiff up top with a melting smile. Alexandria is wilder, almost punk in attitude, and she handled the tricky changes of “Sounds (Movin’ On)” as she did the sliding boards: with haphazard boldness. Ms. Lerman, more subdued in manner, was more rhythmically authoritative. During the conversational “Droppin’ Things,” she drilled into the song’s steadier rhythmic core. All night, her phrasing was unpredictable, with Carter-like pauses and accelerations and punchy accents shaping rapid, hard-driving rolls. She merged into the band — a good strategy for being taken seriously as a musician — but the music of her taps could have had more impact if she had performed it a little more. For lessons in that balance, she could look to Ms. Wade. Coincidentally, I heard Ms. Wade sing last week at another dance show,