Having acquired an English spouse and thus an Anglo-American son, US-born (Eugene, Oregon) Frank Griffith and his wife concluded that the newborn would enjoy a better quality of life in the UK. Thus they arrived in the UK in 1996, and have remained there ever since. Slowly but surely, Frank built a solid UK fan-base via his multi-talents – at the last count his bow had strings allocated to performing, composing, arranging, teaching, writing and hosting two separate weekly radio shows.
I met him first 21 years ago at the Wigan Jazz Festival. A great friend of mine, Marlene VerPlanck, was performing there and, instead of the usual trio, she was accompanied by a local band, The Wigan Jazz Orchestra, a 17-piece outfit that included Frank in the reed section. Frank had known Marlene and her husband Billy VerPlanck in New York long before they began their annual UK tours and stopped by. Marlene, Billy and I were staying in Wigan overnight, and, with introductions concluded, the four of us chatted in our hotel lobby for a good two hours. Within minutes Frank and I discovered that we were on the same musical wavelength.
We kept in loose touch for a while before inevitably drifting apart. There it might have ended, but a few years later Frank joined the Sinatra Music Society, discovered that I was also a member, and prevailed upon a member of the committee to furnish my contact details, since when we have remained in touch via email and telephone. Although he is now based in Liverpool, he does regular gigs in London, which allows us to get together for a drink or two and a catch-up. We spent several hours together in early June 2024, and what follows is the product of that conversation.
I had emailed Frank a basic questionnaire – was he from a musical family, etc, etc. I hoped it would stimulate his memory such that he would arrive for our meeting fully primed, leaving me little to do but press go. That’s pretty much how it happened. We met in a quiet pub and spent four hours raking over a life and career in a profession we both love.
Frank does, in fact, come from a musical background to the extent that there was a piano in the home, and it was played, often and well, by his mother, who also sang and played guitar, so that Frank and his three sisters, grew up surrounded by music. Along with the piano there were other instruments in the home. Although not a musician himself, Frank’s father, a mailman, enjoyed acquiring instruments and filling the house with them. Among them was a clarinet and, from the age of six, Frank began taking lessons on it. Eugene was, in fact, a town with a healthy musical scene, with music taught throughout the school system from grade school through to college and university.
Frank was active in all of this, gradually mastering the whole reed family and winning several awards, including an all-state award (and Oregon is a pretty big state) on alto sax. He continued to study music in university in both Portland and the university of Oregon, supporting himself by working as a busboy. He moved to New York around 20, took a job in a copy shop and studied further at City College, New York.
By now, of course, he was seriously accomplished on all the reeds and had little trouble finding steady work playing weddings, bar-mitzvahs and corporate events plus working with people like Johnny Mandel, Bobby Short and David Allyn. Thus, he was firmly established on the New York scene when he met and married his wife in the early 1990s.
Many readers, of course, will be familiar with his UK career, but for anyone who is not, he taught a class at Brunel University for 20 years. It started out as basic music theory and gradually expanded to include improvisation and the history of popular music. For the bulk of those 20 years he also ran a big band on the Uxbridge campus. By now he was also playing with English musicians in trios, quartets, combos and, his outfit of choice, big bands; these included John Dankworth’s. He was also making a name for himself as a composer and arranger and recording with his own nonet – a group which he feels is manageable and which is his preferred size. In addition to playing with the likes of Dankworth, he recorded three albums with the late Tina May, all of which he is quite proud of, and released another five under his own name.
He is known to, has played with, composed and/or arranged for many on the UK jazz scene, written articles for well-known jazz publications and hosts two weekly radio shows, both named the Frank Griffith Radio Show – The Jazz Cavern. One emanates from New York City and can be heard in the UK via purejazzradio.com (which doesn’t seem to work – Ed). The second show is on Liverpool Community Radio.
Now knee-deep in middle age, he prefers composing and arranging to playing, which, he assures me, requires stamina he’d rather spend on writing. Nevertheless, he still has regular gigs – with and without his nonet – both in Liverpool and throughout the Midlands. With a new album in the can, and a healthy diary on his desk, he still has a few quavers to come before he reaches that final out-chorus. He’s a renaissance man in every sense, and America’s loss has definitely been England’s gain.
