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timeTheofbeaJAZZ HAS BECOME INGRAINED INTO OUR CULTURAL LANDSCAPE OVER THE PAST CENTURY. AHEAD OF A NEW EXHIBITION SPONSORED BY THE ARTS SOCIETY, ALYN SHIPTON EXPLORES HOW JAZZ CHANGED THE WAY WE DANCED, LISTENED AND LIVEDLast April, at the free stage tent of the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, a crowd of young families was stretched out on the grass, enthusiastically clapping along with a set by Kansas Smitty’s House Band. The idea that music from the Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington generation of musicians would be eagerly embraced by listeners of all ages almost 100 years after the sounds of jazz first began to be heard on this side of the Atlantic might have struck those pioneers as extraordinary. And they would have been equally surprised by the singer Mica Paris, mainly known for her soul singing, a few hundred metres away in the main jazz tent, paying homage to Ella Fitzgerald with a young multicultural band drawn from many segments of today’s British society, working alongside one another in a way that would have been unthinkable at the dawn of the 1920s.Jazz has become engrained in the country’s cultural landscape, and although it has perhaps only been truly popular — in the sense of being the dominant form of popular music — two or three times in that century, its place is secure. Its moments of popularity, looking back from the present, came most recently in the ‘trad’ jazz boom of the 1950s and 1960s, before that in the big band swing of the WW2 era, and — most significantly for the forthcoming exhibition at Two Temple Place, presented by The Arts Society and Bulldog Trust — during the ‘jazz age’ of the 1920s and 1930s. Back then, flapper dresses, bobbed haircuts, double-breasted pinstripe suits and fedoras might have been the outward trappings of jazz couture, but what the curator of this event, Prof Catherine Tackley (Head of Music at the University of Liverpool) is aiming to do is more profound. She wants us to get under Left: H Clark, Jazzing in England from Pan, 27 March 1920, page 19THE AGE OF JAZZ31The Arts Society ReviewAutumn 2017