Ken Franckling, a gifted and prolific photographer, writer, critic and ardent supporter of jazz and jazz musicians, died unexpectedly March 24 at his home in North Port, Florida. He was 73.
A native of Woodstock, NY, Franckling turned his passion for jazz into a lifetime of writing and shooting photos for publications including JazzTimes, Hot House, OffBeat, DownBeat and AllAboutJazz.com, as well as his long-running blog Ken Franckling’s Jazz Notes. A founding member and active participant in the Jazz Journalists Association since the mid 1980s, he introduced his work in “Seeing Jazz With Ken Franckling,” the JJA Photography Master Class.
Franckling won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism in 1987 for his lengthy profile of Miles Davis, on the eve of the trumpeter’s 60th birthday. He received the JJA’s Lona Foote-Bob Parent Award for Photographer of the year in 2003 and 2016. His own selection of his extraordinary images, from a collection featuring more than 2,000 musicians, is the substance of his well-received fine art photo book Jazz in the Key of Light: Eighty of Our Finest Jazz Musicians Speak for Themselves, published in 2014.
“As I look at the photo of Sarah Vaughan leaning on the photo and reeling backwards as she sang with her eye closed – putting everything she had into the song – I almost feel that ‘Sassy’ is still with us,” late jazz impresario and Newport Festival founder George Wein wrote in his foreword to the book. “[Ken’s] photo of Miles Davis, with his chin resting on his fist and his eyes scanning to the right, reveals a musician who is a total enigma; you haven’t the slightest idea what Miles might be thinking.”
Franckling was a well-known presence at the Newport Jazz Festival, covered it for 41 consecutive editions, including last summer’s. For 20 years, he put together the Jazz Education Guide recordings package for JazzTimes.
He began his career as, variously, a reporter, feature writer, editor, bureau manager and jazz columnist for UPI (United Press International) from 1971 to 1990. Among his high-profile assignments: Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation in a federal courtroom in Baltimore, the 25th anniversary of Woodstock, the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, America’s Cup yacht races in Newport, RI, and Pope John Paul II’s Boston stop on his first visit to the United States.
Franckling subsequently continued to ply his trade as a jazz writer and photographer while simultaneously working in corporate communications for nearly two decades. In 2011, he retired as a senior vice president at Providence-based Citizens Financial Group, relocated to the Sunshine State and switched to full-time music freelancing and writing/editing consulting.
Franckling’s comprehensive list of 2022 jazz deaths, which he titled “Final Bars,” was published in January on the JJA site. Before that, on his blog, he maintained a running tally of jazz people who died of Covid or related complications. An invaluable resource documenting a troubling chapter in jazz history, it extended to five “chapters.” He also wrote an epic article 2022: The Year in Jazz with headings such as “The Pandemic, Year Three,” “Russia’s War on Ukraine,” “Jazz and Social Justice” — based on deep research and original reporting.
A significant and influential figure in jazz journalism, Franckling was a modest and easygoing guy who for most of his career focused his lens and pen on the Northeast music scene, in recent years extending his coverage to Southwest Florida.
For his final two posts on his blog, he reviewed a Punta Gorda concert featuring Nashville pianist and singer Chris Walters (March 19) and a duo performance by pianist Dick Hyman and guitarist Diego Figueiredo, at the Sarasota Jazz Festival (March 18).
Franckling was a 1971 history graduate of St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York. There, he was involved with the campus radio station, an experience that he credited with sparking his lifelong passion for jazz. He participated in the 1983-1984 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship program for mid-career journalists at the University of Michigan, where he studied music, American culture and photography.
“That really is where the photography bloomed and blossomed for me,” he said during his live “Seeing Jazz With Ken Franckling” master class for the JJA, archived on YouTube. “And I developed some passable darkroom skills and continued to build my eye as to what I wanted to capture on film.”
Franckling’s fine art prints have been exhibited at museums and galleries across the United States and Europe and are a part of many private collections.
On a personal note, I’ll greatly miss our frequent online communications about jazz, music journalism and the sad state of politics in Florida and beyond. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one with whom he always shared funny, irreverent memes. He is survived by his wife Kathryn Franckling, daughter Heather Franckling, step-daughter Jillian Merchant-Shemenski and grandson Alistair Shemenski.
Ed. note: Indeed, many JJA members will miss Ken keenly, from good times together at Newport and other fests. JJA president Howard Mandel has on his living-room wall a hand-colored print of Miles Davis by Ken Franckling.
