The Frank Driggs Collection

[Jim Dye]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/nyregion/01jazz.html?hp

The New York Times

March 1, 2005

. . . And All That Jazz Memorabilia!

By COREY KILGANNON

In a basement apartment on Charlton Street in the West Village, there are eight tall file cabinets stuffed with hundreds of dog-eared manila folders.

The cabinets do not look imposing or important, but they contain possibly the finest collection of jazz photos in the world.

Even people with a passing interest in jazz photographs may recall seeing the "Courtesy of the Frank Driggs Collection" tag on pictures in newspapers, magazines, books and documentaries.

Mr. Driggs has almost 100,000 pieces of jazz memorabilia, mostly photographs. Several hundred of them are published each year, and he was the biggest contributor of photos to Ken Burns's highly regarded television documentary chronicling the history of jazz.

Mr. Driggs has rarely displayed his collection publicly. He has never advertised, or even listed himself or his business in a phone directory. But after a half-century of diligent collecting, Mr. Driggs, 75, says he would like to devote more time to writing about jazz and practicing his trumpet. He is seeking to sell his collection and says he has approached several prominent jazz institutions, including Jazz at Lincoln Center. So far, a sale is not in the offing.

The collection has been appraised at $1.5 million by Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers in Newark. Not only could Mr. Driggs use the money, but he wants the collection to go to an organization that will value it and put the photographs on public display, he said.

The only problem is that Mr. Driggs does not seem ready to actually part with his photographs, each painstakingly procured and preserved. Most of them lack identification information, since Mr. Driggs, a lifelong fan and student of jazz, can identify most of the musicians in his collection by sight.

For years, the collection was a hobby, not a business. He used to estimate his inventory by the thickness of the folders of each band, musician or genre. But recently, a college student spent a few weeks counting the photographs and categorizing them. The student tallied 78,188 images in all - including 1,545 of Duke Ellington, 1,083 of Louis Armstrong, 692 of Benny Goodman, and 585 of Count Basie.

Most of the photos have never been published. Many may never be. Often, clients want the same few popular photographs of the most popular artists. There are few requests for Mr. Driggs's 57 photographs of Frankie Newton or the 199 of Red Nichols. Both are somewhat obscure trumpeters.

"I don't care; I like them," Mr. Driggs explained. "Most photo agencies have 5 or 10 pictures of Louis. "I have a thousand. Why? Because I want them."

The bulk of Mr. Driggs's archive - he calls it an American music collection - consists of early ragtime and rural blues artists and New Orleans groups up to big bands of the 1930's and 1940's.

To satisfy clients' requests , he has added other genres, like rock, country and pop. For example, he now has 46 photos of the tenor saxophonist Chu Berry, but also 58 photographs of Chuck Berry.

He showed off an original 1924 photograph of Louis Armstrong with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, autographed by Armstrong to Fate Marable, a riverboat bandleader who had hired Armstrong several years earlier. It was given to Mr. Driggs by the wife of Harry Dial, a drummer for Fats Waller.

Mr. Driggs keeps an additional eight cabinets of sheet music, negatives, playbills and other memorabilia in a large storage space nearby on Vandam Street.

But his main photo archive is kept in the basement of an 1827 town house once owned by Aaron Burr and now owned by Joan Peyser, a writer mostly on classical music and artists, with whom Mr. Driggs lives.

Before he moved back to Manhattan in April, he kept his collection in the basement of his house in Flatbush, which he sold last year to move in with Ms. Peyser. For years, visitors had taken the No. 2 train to the end of the line and called from a pay phone to have Mr. Driggs pick them up in his Ford Taurus.

"It was always word of mouth," Ms. Peyser said. "You had to work to find him. It was kind of a cult thing."

In one drawer, the Lee Morse folder is followed by Jelly Roll Morton and Gerry Mulligan. Anita O'Day is next to Jazz in Oklahoma. Stan Kenton is followed by B. B. King. Eartha Kitt is followed by Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy. The Nightclubs folder includes membership cards to the Stork Club, the Hunt Club, the Royal Box and Nick's.

Mr. Driggs has an electric typewriter in his office, but no computer. He uses Ms. Peyser's fax machine upstairs. The phone is old, and when it rang, it was an old-fashioned bell ring. Mr. Driggs answered it and said: "O.K., send me a fax. That's the easiest way."

"They want a picture of Snakehips Tucker, the great Harlem snake dancer," he said, pulling a folder labeled "Dancers (Afro American)" and flipping through the photos. "That's Chuck and Chuckles, and that's Peg Leg Bates. Man, he was some dancer. Come on, I got to have Snakehips Tucker in here somewhere. Where's Snakehips? Here it is." He pulled out a photo of a smiling man standing with his lithe body postured like the letter S.

Mr. Morgenstern, the jazz studies institute director, called the collection astonishing and of "tremendous depth."

"It's a unique assemblage of jazz materials you won't find anywhere else," he said. "Frank had the foresight and advantage to acquire these materials from the musicians and their estates, and now that they're all gone, he has this unique, one-of-a-kind treasure trove. There isn't another like it."

Most of Mr. Driggs's photographs are in the public domain, since many are publicity stills and others are family or personal photographs or professional pictures whose photographers are long forgotten. For pictures whose photographer is known, Mr. Driggs splits the publication fees with them, he said.

Mr. Driggs, whose father was a jazz musician, listened to jazz as a young boy in Vermont. When he was 6 his parents divorced, and he moved with his mother to Westchester County, where he listened to late-night radio broadcasts of jazz from nightclubs and hotel ballrooms.

After graduating from Princeton in 1952 with a degree in political science, he moved to Manhattan, working days as a page at NBC and spending nights listening to jazz at places like Basin Street, Jimmy Ryan's, Birdland, Café Bohemia and the Savoy Ballroom.

He began gathering and saving posters, fliers, ticket stubs, recordings and photos and other memorabilia. He checked out photograph sales and would ask musicians he interviewed for jazz magazines for access to their personal collections.

There was the stash that the tenor saxophonist Al Sears gave him. There were the negatives he bought from Leo Arsene, an entertainment photographer who had a shop on Seventh Avenue.

"I was interested in the history of jazz and I began buying photographs to fill in the gaps in my knowledge and gaps in the current accounts of the day," Mr. Driggs said.

One thing he never did was carry his own camera.

"I don't know why; don't ask," he said ruefully.

In the late 1950's, the legendary producer John Hammond hired Mr. Driggs to help him at Columbia Records. Soon Mr. Driggs was producing records, organizing recording sessions and putting out important re-issues of recordings by Fletcher Henderson, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa and the blues man Robert Johnson.

He left Columbia in the mid-1970's.

"I've been living off this stuff ever since," he said, patting his file cabinets lovingly.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Edited March 1, 2005 by Jim Dye

[Christiern]

This article was already posted.

Edited March 1, 2005 by Christiern

[Jim Dye]

er, erm, uh...Not with pictures!

Sorry.

[brownie]

er, erm, uh...Not with pictures!

Sorry.

They were copyrighted

[bertrand]

They are the exclusive property of Frank Driggs - can't you read

Seriously, one look at his mug and you can tell he's a fraud.

Bertrand.

[AllenLowe]

hey - those are my pictures - as a matter of fact, that's me in the first one with my ex-wife -

[sheldonm]

...I like the way he handles the prints......big ass greeeezy thumbs prints abound!!!

[Man with the Golden Arm]

Did not see this thread when I posted my redundancy at the same time in the "jazz in print..." forum (it is jazz and it is in print) and have since deleted it per request of deus62.

Much better w/ the pics. Since folks' hairs have been crossing their asses about all thats copyright-able I chose to go w/ the link.

[BERIGAN]

Seriously, one look at his mug and you can tell he's a fraud.

Bertrand.

Are saying that's not the real Frank Driggs????