My inspiration for picking up spoons came from my grandfather, who played spoons as a pastime while deployed in Japan during WWII. After the war, he passed his love for playing spoons to my mother, who in turn passed it on to me.

My deep dive into spoons playing started in 2012, when I had an opportunity to play spoons for a folk tune in a choir concert at my college, Missori S&T. After I completed college, I started experimenting with adapting spoons for swing music and sat in occasionally with various bands in the Midwest such as Miss Jubilee. In 2017, I began performing regularly with local Kansas City jazz groups, including A La Mode and Bram Wijnands, and their support further motivated and challenged me to hone my skills.

To adapt spoons for swing music, I started by drawing inspiration from tap dancers from the swing era: Like spoons players, tap dancers have a similar challenge of maximizing the variety of sounds out of a limited tonal range, so they made a great parallel to build up a foundation of swing rhythms. From there, I looked to the swing drumming giants to find more ways to lock into the swing rhythm.

For more information, please contact me at pbshilli@posteo.net