With regret but also appreciation, the JJA turns out-of-house for coverage of notable musicians whose lives ended in the calendar year 2023. We strongly recommend Jazz Passings by the redoubtable Andrey Henkin as the place to go to see who’s gone.
With the unexpected demise of Ken Franckling on March 24, 2023, the JJA lost an esteemed, loyal and highly productive member, who for several years had assiduously compiled information on musicians and music business participants who had died.
Ken drew from international sources to provide an impressive and capacious, if not comprehensive, of the world’s population of active jazzers, as he wrote, “Compiled for the Jazz Journalists Association from sources including local newspapers, the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt newsletter, AllAboutJazz.com, Wikipedia, the New York Times, Legacy.com, Rolling Stone, Variety, JazzTimes.com, blogs, listserves, Facebook pages and European publications.
Prior to Franckling taking on that responsibilities and such even more capacious timelinesof jazz events in a given year, a wide-ranging obituary was written annually for the JJA annual by Kenny Mathiesen, Scottish jazz chronicler, and he’s hugely thanked for that service. The expectations and format of articles of this nature have developed since the JJA first published them; now an international perspective is required, a search function is desired as are the valuable links sending readers to verifiable source material.
Andrey Henkin, co-founder and former editor of The New York City Jazz Record, provides those niceties at Jazz Passings. He’s been posting about jazz deaths since 2012, focused from the first principally on people who otherwise go unmentioned. His work is a major service to those of us interested in the lives of musicians.
Tom Hull has also compiled a valuable list of the recently deceased at ArtsFuse.org, providing links to several others. It’s unclear to this writer whether there is 100% overlap among any of these sites — that is, if a single one is comprehensive of all the others. But regardless, work of this nature is a service to history and deserves thanks. It should not be taken for granted.
