He taught Brooke Shields, Naomi Campbell, and Britney Spears to dance

I recently stumbled on a couple of Frank Hatchett records. I had no idea what they were, but the story turned out to be incredible.

What I was holding is a record made by a man who does not play on it. Hatchett was a jazz dance teacher, his name sits on sixteen albums, and he is not on a single one of them as a musician.

The music came from a rotating pool of studio players working under a musical director named Don Alan Tipton, pressed by a label whose entire business was selling instruction records in bulk to dance schools. Two and a half minutes a song, because that is how long a class combination runs. Nobody in that room believed they were making anything that would outlive the week.

Except look who was in the room. Fred McFarlane, who would go on to work with Madonna and Keith Sweat. Bernard Davis, who ended up playing with Kool and the Gang and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Tamara Tunie, who most people now know from Law and Order SVU, singing on these things.

And Hatchett was not some guy who fell into this. He was a kid in Connecticut whose chore was walking his sister to her dance class. He sat in the corner pretending to read comic books. One snowy morning the teacher was late, and this boy stood up and started correcting the girls on their steps. He went on to dance in clubs in New York and Vegas, turned up on television beside Sammy Davis Jr and Eartha Kitt, then went home to Massachusetts and opened a school.

He trained under Syvilla Fort, who came out of Katherine Dunham. In 1982 he opened a studio in New York with Maurice Hines that became Broadway Dance Center. Brooke Shields, Naomi Campbell and Britney Spears all passed through his classes. His students called him Papa Frank.

None of that is on the cover. Just his name, a drawing of his face, and two birds.

I keep thinking about how much of anyone's best work gets made on a Tuesday, for money, for a purpose nobody would call art, by people who have no idea yet who they are going to become.