Over the last decade, many British bands, clubs, pubs, and hotels have been offering evenings of “authentic” Jazz Age entertainment. Since 2013, event organizers have capitalized first on the revival by Hollywood of interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and then on international smash hit TV series Peaky Blinders. Their flyers offered attendees (pretend) bootleg liquor by the bathtub and hours of live, red hot jazz—plus a chance for men to wear an old-fashioned hat without being called names.
But all of that stuff can scram, says Italian-born New Yorker Giacomo Smith. The reed man, composer, vocalist, and entrepreneur currently lives in London, where he fronts Kansas Smitty’s House Band and Kansas Smitty’s Hot Five. From 2015 to 2020 he also ran Kansas Smitty’s, a cool little bar in Hackney, where he employed his contemporaries to entertain eager crowds of jazz lovers. (As a proud Northerner, I don’t have much time for London—but they do have us beat when it comes to putting on live jazz.)
It was an old-fashioned joint with wooden tables, neon signs, and dim, incandescent light bulbs—but it wasn’t nostalgic for any decade or place (or fictional work) in particular. “People often said the bar felt ‘authentic,’” Giacomo told me, “but authentic to what? It wasn’t a recreation of anything. There were no pictures on the walls or anything.”
