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SUPPORT YOUNG TALENTPre-ordering the exhibition catalogue online will help support the talent of young arts. The cost is £7.50, but for pre-ordered copies, 60% of the retail price will go into education and learning activitiesaround the exhibition,including workshops, talks and live events.The catalogue has beenwritten by Professor Catherine Tackley, selected by The Arts Society and the Bulldog Trust as the curator.To pre-order the catalogue, visit theartssociety.org/age-of-jazz The catalogue will be ready from 19 Januaryand can either be collected from Two Temple Place or delivered by mail. Please note that the catalogue is still under development and may look different to that illustrated below. 1 Sketch of London club interior, 1926 2 Promo card for Ken ‘Snakehips’Johnson, 19381the skin of Britain’s inter-war period and explore the jazz age in terms of what we heard, who was playing it, how and where we danced, where we drank, what we drank from (coffee sets, jugs, and other tableware), what we read, what we wore and what we saw, in terms of the visual depiction of jazz.Jazz was fortunate in that it arrived just as the predominant means of distributing music to a mass audience was changing profoundly. In the 21-year span of the exhibition, music went from its traditional 18th- and 19th-century mode of communication to modern mass media in one giant leap. During and just after WW1, sheet music was the main channel by which new songs and tunes reached the public. Irving Berlin and other successful songwriters of the 1910s had become used to printed music sales in the hundreds of thousands, and most homes in all social classes had access to a piano, even if they did not own one directly. So the exhibition will rightly focus on the final hurrah of the mass sales of printed music, with elaborately illustrated covers, chord symbols for banjo and ukulele players and beautiful music engraving that was the acme of the typesetter’s art. And it will show how pianolas, those automatic pianos that reproduced performances by means of punched paper rolls and compressed air first brought virtuoso playing to the drawing room. The average British drawing room was considerably less opulent than the surroundings of Two Temple Place where the exhibition will be held, but it is nonetheless significant to experience the music of this era in the environment of William Waldorf Astor’s mansion.Close by the sheet music and pianola in the exhibition will be the agents of change, the gramophone and the wireless. With the advent of the 78rpm record, a whole band or the voice of a virtuoso singer could be brought to the drawing room. Within a decade of 1918, sheet music sales had collapsed on both sides of the Atlantic, and record sales began to boom, with the African IT BECAME POSSIBLE TO LISTEN TO JAZZ MUSICIANS AT HOME32THE AGE OF JAZZThe Arts Society ReviewAutumn 2017