Louis Armstrong before he was Satchmo? A youthful Ella? For photographs of musicians great or obscure, just about everyone turns to Frank Driggs, jazz man.

Publication: Smithsonian

Publication Date: 01-SEP-05

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2005 Smithsonian Institution

There's a certain way jazz musicians from the 1930s pose for photographs, half- turned to face the camera, symmetrically arrayed around the bandleader, who can be identified by his regal smile and proximity to the microphone. Publicity stills of the period were the equivalent of English court paintings, hackwork intended to exalt their subjects and attract admiration to their finery. Bandleaders even took titles borrowed from the aristocracy: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Earl Hines ... well, Earl was actually the man's given name, but he lived up to it in a way no tracksuited rap star could approach, no matter how big the diamond in his earlobe. There's a picture of Hines with his band on the stage at the Pearl Theater in Philadelphia, exuding swank. Their suit pants, which bear stripes of black satin down the seams, break perfectly over their gleaming shoes; their jacket lapels have the span of a Madagascar fruit bat; their hair is slicked. They were on top of their world. The year was 1932, and about one in four Americans were out of work.

If Frank Driggs could go back in time and choose his year of birth, he would pick 1890, so he would have been in his prime during the swing era, which he defines as roughly from the 1920s until its slow postwar decline into bebop and modernism. He was around for the very end of that era as a young man in New York City, and much of his life since then has been devoted to recapturing the spirit of those times, for which a stack of recordings as tall as a man is necessary but not sufficient. The missing element is...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.