Bright Moments Posted March 11, 2005 Report Share Posted March 11, 2005 New York Trove of Jazz Photography Seeks Buyer Thu Mar 10,11:08 AM ET Entertainment - Reuters By Timothy Gardner NEW YORK (Reuters) - For sale: perhaps the world's finest and biggest pictorial history of jazz and American music. Must be kept together. Frank Driggs, a former jazz journalist and record producer, started buying jazz photos from collectors more than half a century ago. After word got out he was a top collector, musicians often gave him pictures. "For filmmakers who often visit hundreds of tiny archives to make a documentary you can't appreciate enough the value of a collection that contains so many photos," documentary filmmaker Ken Burns told Reuters. Driggs was the single biggest supplier of pictures for "Jazz," the 17-hour television series by Burns. Driggs' nearly 80,000 photos range from 1898 shots of ragtime's Scott Joplin and Tom Turpin to portraits of big bands at since-closed Harlem and East Village haunts of the 1950s. But everything has its price. Dan Morgenstern, director of New Jersey's Institute of Jazz Studies, has assessed the collection at $1.5 million. "I would give my eyeteeth if we could buy it, but we don't have those kind of resources, said Morgenstern. John Edward Hasse, curator of American music at the Smithsonian, said the Washington institution would welcome the collection with open arms, but Congress doesn't allocate acquisition funds to the museum. "Really it would be owned by all Americans, and we'd be best placed to preserve it," said Hasse. The taxpayer-funded Smithsonian has often displayed bits of Driggs' photo and music memorabilia collection. New York's Lincoln Center also loves the collection, but no offer is planned. "These are depressed times for institutions," said Phil Schaap, the curator of jazz at the center. Driggs, 75, keeps the collection behind iron-gated windows in his basement office of a Soho townhouse. They fill seven tall file cabinets. The lion's share are early jazz. He has received offers for parts of his collection but he refuses to break it up. While other picture agencies may have 10 to 15 Louis Armstrong photos, Driggs has more than 1,000. One, from 1918, shows Armstrong as a teenager with his mother and sister in New Orleans. Another shows Armstrong with his hero, King Oliver, after following him up to Chicago in the 1920s. The photos became more than a hobby for Driggs in 1977, when leasing them earned him $18,000, matching his salary as a record producer. Now they earn him up to $100,000 per year. But Driggs, the co-author of a book on Kansas City jazz to be published this spring, now wants to play his trumpet and write rather than taking constant calls to lease photos. "I'm not anxious to kill myself, so I don't advertise," he said. "People find me." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AllenLowe Posted March 11, 2005 Report Share Posted March 11, 2005 too late - Chris Albertson pulled a heist the other night and grabbed it - Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alankin Posted March 12, 2005 Report Share Posted March 12, 2005 I'd just like to borrow it for the weekend. I'll definitely return the photos on Monday. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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