Frank Driggs

Frank Driggs (actually: Franklin Swan Driggs * 29. January 1930 in Manchester , Bennington County , Vermont ; † 20th September 2011 in New York City ) was an American jazz - and blues - historians and music producer .

Life

Drigg's father was a jazz musician, and he listened to jazz on the radio from childhood in Vermont . He completed his studies in political science at Princeton in 1952 and then began working in New York, influenced by Marshall Stearns a . a. to collect material on jazz history . As part of his own " oral history " project, he interviewed jazz musicians and collected everything they entrusted to him for archiving, but also bought material from photographers. His finds - especially his photos - he published a. a. in " The Jazz Review ".

In the late 1950s, John Hammond commissioned him to publish blues musicians such as Robert Johnson for Columbia Records (partly from their archives) ; for his complete edition of the recordings by Robert Johnson he was awarded a Grammy in 1991 . He was also responsible for reissues of jazz greats such as Billie Holiday , Duke Ellington , Fletcher Henderson , Gene Krupa . He also worked a. a. for the record labels Stash, Okeh , MCA , Time-Life Records and RCA Victor , for which he re-released the recordings of the Bluebird label in the 1970s. In the mid-1970s he left Columbia and lived mainly from exploiting his archives.

Driggs wrote the lyrics - liner notes - for numerous record covers and was journalistic a. a. works for the jazz magazine Down Beat and the “Living Blues Magazine”. His interest in Kansas City Jazz and the Territory Bands of the Southwest was reflected in the corresponding chapter in Hentoff and McCarthy's book (Eds.) "Jazz" (1959) and in his 2006 book "Kansas City Jazz - From" published by Oxford University Press Ragtime to Bebop ”(with Chuck Haddix, head of the Marr Sound Archives ). He published a selection of photos from his large (most recently 100,000 photos) collection with Harris Lewine in the photo book “Black Beauty, White Heat”. He was also a major photo source for Ken Burns' jazz documentary (on PBS).

He deposited his oral history collection in the Marr Sound Archives of the Miller Nichols Library of the University of Missouri in Kansas City . Driggs sold the photos he collected privately in one of the largest agencies for jazz photography (Frank Driggs Collection) , which was housed in his private apartment in New York City. In 2005 he planned to sell his photo collection.

Frank Driggs died on September 20, 2011 at the age of 81.

Fonts

• Frank Driggs & Harris Lewine Black Beauty, White Heat: A Pictorial History of Classic Jazz 1920-1950 Da Capo Press ISBN 030680672X (1996)
• Frank Driggs & Chuck Haddix Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop - A History Oxford 2006; ISBN 0195307127

Web links

• Frank Driggs Oral History Collection (English)
• New York Times articles on his photo collection (English)
• Frank Driggs Collection in the IMDb
• Frank Driggs Collection in the New York Times

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Obituary in Miami Herald  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Frank Driggs Biographical Data, Collector of Jazz Photos, Dies at 81, by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, September 25, 2011
3. ↑ Frank Driggs: Jazz Man, by Jerry Adler, Smithsonian magazine, September 2005 ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2009) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Frank Driggs in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved March 3, 2016.