Mark Quigley, UCLA Film & Television Archive Uncovers “Frankly Jazz”

On Making Life Swing: Jazz on TV and in Other Unexpected Places, written by Joanie Harmon

Mark Quigley says that he would have worked to preserve and screen episodes of the KTLA series, “Frankly Jazz” even if he hadn’t already been a jazz fan.

“Programs from this era do survive on tape, but not as much – especially at the local level – as you would hope,” notes Quigley, who is the John H. Mitchell Television Archivist for the UCLA Film & Television Archive. “There is more lost than survives. So, when I get a call from someone that says, “I have ten video reels from “Frankly Jazz” from KTLA in 1962,” that’s about the most exciting call that you can get.”

On Nov. 4, Quigley will present the Archive’s second online screening of “Frankly Jazz,” a sadly short-lived series that was hosted by jazz scholar and former deejay Frank Evans in the early 1960s. The show, which featured mostly Los Angeles-based musicians, is according to Quigley, a record of not only the progressive music of the time, but also of social movements and technical ingenuity around the then-nascent art form of television…