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some, for example in (literally and metaphorically) underground clubs, a wider public encountered jazz as an element in ever-reliable ‘dance music’ broadcasts by the BBC’s own Dance Orchestra or from ‘approved’ London venues such as the Savoy Hotel. For people across the UK, jazz music would be most readily encountered as music for dancing, albeit alongside established partner dances such as the waltz. Similarly, it has been argued that the jazz-moderne style, as seen in notable buildings such as Battersea Power Station, provided a compromise between the emergence of streamlined high modernism and the more florid styles of design that had come before. Although supressed to an extent within the mainstream, jazz provided a shot in the arm for social dance and dance music in Britain. New venues made this pastime more accessible for the working classes, and radio broadcasts brought performances by the best dance bands into living rooms up and down the country. Dancing was the obsession of the age and is represented in many artworks of the period, but the colour and rhythm of jazz exerted a much wider cultural influence. Works such as William Walton’s Façade (with poems by Edith Sitwell) and Constant Lambert’s The Rio Grande ballet demonstrated an injection of instrumental colour and rhythmic vitality from popular music into art music composition. Similar aesthetic properties can be readily observed in vivid designs for Carlton Ware and textiles from Foxton and Sanderson, which extended the jazz influence into a domestic setting. Stylish cocktail cabinets were installed to enable the latest creations to be mixed at home, and coffee could be served in china decorated in ‘jazz’ designs.The proliferation of British dance music did not satisfy either emergent jazz musicians or enthusiasts for long. There was growing recognition that the ‘symphonising’ of popular music (following the model of the American bandleader Paul Whiteman) might represent a compromise too far, and that the African American roots of the music, represented in Britain through visits by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington in particular, had been neglected. For some, these led to pilgrimages across the Atlantic to experience American jazzfor themselves – musician and critic Spike Hughes provides vivid accounts of nights in New York’s Cotton Club, just as Edward Burra was inspired to document his experiences of Harlem.Most British jazz fans fed their passion through record collecting, building their knowledge through avid reading of the latest jazz criticism in periodicals such as Melody Maker. Jazz provided the opportunity for a more cosmopolitan outlook, inflected as it was by the wider roots of the black British population and newly arrived immigrants from the wider Empire, in particular the Caribbean. Do you have jazz-inspired British art or objects from the 1920s and 30s? The Arts Society is also interested in personal photographs of bands or dancing from this period. Please email: jazzage@theartssociety.org4321 Milk jugs from Honiton Pottery and Poole Pottery, early 1930s2 Wallpaper maquette by Henri Stephany for Desfossé & Karth, c192063 ‘Paramount’ fabric design by Sanderson4 The Savoy Orpheans, c1925. Their jazz music was broadcast on the BBCJAZZ CULTURE43The Arts Society ReviewSummer 2017IMAGES: FLICKR.COM, PAUL WILLIAMS/JAMES GARDINER COLLECTION