Tucked into a converted warehouse district in Chicago's South Loop, Sombrillo Conservatory of Movement and Sound has spent four decades puzzling over a deceptively simple question: What if jazz training treated the body and the instrument as one?
The answer is the institution's signature credential, the Dance Diploma—a three-year, accredited program that fuses jazz dance, music theory, and instrumental improvisation into a single rigorous track. Founded in 1983 by pianist and choreographer Lillian Sombrillo, the conservatory remains one of the few places in the world where students graduate equally comfortable behind a drum kit and in a tap routine, or weaving between both in real time onstage.
"Jazz is not just music; it's a way of life, a language that transcends borders and unites souls." —Professor Lillian Sombrillo, Founder of Sombrillo Conservatory
What the Dance Diploma Actually Means
The name confuses nearly everyone at first. A "Dance Diploma" from Sombrillo's is not a standard dance degree with a jazz soundtrack tacked on. Rather, it grew out of Sombrillo's own career straddling modern dance companies and big-band pits in the 1960s and 70s. She designed a curriculum built on the premise that jazz improvisation lives as fully in physical phrasing as it does in melodic invention.
Students split their time between the dance studio and the music hall. Mornings begin with technique classes in tap, Latin jazz, and Sombrillo's house style of "weighted release"—a movement vocabulary drawn from the off-balance accenting of bebop rhythm sections. Afternoons shift to theory, ear training, and applied instrumental study. Every third semester culminates in a collaborative showcase where dancers must compose or improvise live music for their own choreography, and instrumentalists must perform movement sequences alongside their playing.
The Faculty: Practitioners of Both Disciplines
The teaching staff reflects this dual mandate. Marcus Wei, who chairs the percussion department, spent twelve years with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater before touring as a drummer with the Jazz Messengers Legacy Band. Sarah Okonkwo, the head of brass studies, holds a Bessie Award for her solo horn-and-dance piece Blue Period and has recorded with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. Their mentorship extends beyond technical instruction into the logistics of bridging two notoriously siloed industries.
"We tell students early: you're not training to be a dancer who can sort of play, or a musician who can sort of move," Okonkwo says. "The job market doesn't need half-skilled hybrids. It needs artists who can argue, from muscle memory, that these disciplines have always been the same thing."
Where Graduates Land
The program's small annual cohort—typically eighteen to twenty-four students—has produced a network of alumni working at the intersection of jazz and movement.
Elena Voss (Dance Diploma, 2009) is now the associate music director for Swing State, the long-running improvised dance-theater piece at Brooklyn Academy of Music, where she both drums and choreographs in nightly rotating casts. Darnell Reeves (2015) founded the touring ensemble Body & Reed, which pairs tap with free-jazz saxophone quartet configurations; the group was nominated for a 2023 Jazz Journalists Association Award for Live Performance of the Year. Other graduates have filtered into arts administration, scoring for dance companies, and teaching positions at conservatories from Amsterdam to Melbourne.
Staying Relevant in a Crowded Field
For all its distinctiveness, Sombrillo's faces the same pressures as peer institutions. The rise of online music production and influencer-driven dance culture has forced curriculum updates in recent years. Since 2019, the conservatory has added courses in digital scoring for movement and sample-based improvisation, and it now partners with Chicago's Hubbard Street Dance for semester-long residencies that expose students to contemporary repertoire outside the jazz canon.
The school also contends with its size. Without the endowment of a Juilliard or a Berklee, it relies heavily on tuition and competitive grant funding, which limits scholarship availability and keeps admission highly selective.
A Concrete Beginning
On a recent Tuesday evening, first-year student Amara Oduya could be found in Studio 4, rehearsing a solo piece that asked her to trigger live electronic loops through pressure-sensitive floor panels while executing a series of falling-and-recovery phrases derived from Jack Cole technique. Between takes, she adjusted her ankle monitor and laughed with Wei about a tempo drift in the fourth loop.
"It's never just one thing here," she said afterward. "I came in as a trained dancer who was terrified of improvising. Now I'm writing charts. It's still terrifying. But at least my body knows what to do while my brain catches up."
For those who make it through Sombrillo's doors, the
