Frank Driggs

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

Life

Driggs father was a jazz musician, and he heard from his childhood in Vermont to jazz on the radio. He completed his studies in political science at Princeton in 1952 and then started in New York influenced by Marshall Stearns, among other things, to collect material for the history of jazz. As part of his own " oral history " project, he interviewed a jazz musician and collected everything they entrusted to him for archiving, but also bought material from photographers. His findings - especially his photographs - he published, among other things in " Jazz Review ".

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

Driggs wrote the lyrics - Liner Notes - for numerous record covers and was a journalist, among other things worked 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 Hentoffs and McCarthy's book (ed.) "Jazz " (1959) down and come out in his 2006 Oxford University Press book " Kansas City Jazz - From Ragtime to Bebop "(with Chuck Haddix, director of the Marr sound Archives). A selection of photos from his great ( last comprehensive 100.000 photos) collection he published in 1982 with Harris Lewine in the photo essay "Black Beauty, White Heat ". Also for the jazz documentation by Ken Burns ( PBS ), he was one of the main sources for photos.

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

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

Writings

• 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