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Amid headlines about the capital’s once-legendary live music venues closing their doors, Kansas Smitty’s bar continues with a vibrant programme. While the Kansas Smitty's House Band (above) are preeminent upholders of the ragtimecanon, a hefty portion of their original compositions reinvent the proto-jazz form in a novel way. In recent months, the band has focused on the eccentric compositions of early jazz composer, Jelly Roll Morton, while continuing to record and perform their own modern ‘rags’. Kansas Smitty’s bar shares the band’s ‘all-in’ philosophy. Over the course of a month, a heavy measure of jazz sits alongside nights of flamenco, classical, electronic, folk, funk and blues. This umbrella of influences is one of the main reasons that the Kansas Smitty’s House Band and the Kansas Smitty’s name have become synonymous with urbane, informed and forward-thinking jazz music.kansassmittys.comA NEW GENERATION5 Ecko radio from the 1930s6 Picnic with gramophone.Photograph by Ralph Ponsonby Watts, c1930SEE THE AGENTS OF CHANGE: THE GRAMOPHONE AND WIRELESS56photographers and artists depicted such American giants of the music as Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Adelaide Hall, Elizabeth Welch and other black artists. And we’ll equally have the opportunity to see images of such white players as Paul Whiteman (whose musicians made the headlines by arriving at the Royal Albert Hall by bicycle for a concert during the 1926 General Strike), Ted Lewis, and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Rollini. Yet this does not mean that Britain did not create its own jazz heroes and heroines, from bandleaders familiar from the BBC such as Jack Hylton and Henry Hall to black players such as Ken “Snakehips” Johnson or Rudolph Dunbar. The photos and paintings will give us a sense of how people dressed and danced to jazz, dance being the social entertainment related to the music that continued right through the period of the exhibition. We can also see IMAGES: MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY; KANSAS SMITTY’S HOUSE BAND36THE AGE OF JAZZThe Arts Society ReviewAutumn 2017