Since much of my writings here are complaining about something I wanted to write a bit about my work concerning my father's jazz and espionage collections otherwise known as The George A. Borgman Archives.Since my father died in October of 2009, I have been going through my father's papers, writings, recordings, magazines and book collection. I've been organizing his extensive collection of papers, writings and recordings, backing up his computer files and indexing what his current collection contains. I hope to add to and extend the collection too and transcribe his recorded interviews with musicians so that one day these transcriptions might be available to researchers.
He has a massive collection of photographs that he took over the years of jazz musicians and performers and I hope to be able to make some of those available for purchase.
I'm a little behind in all this work and have not gone forward with our plans to publish some of my father's writings. One book that is planned to be published is his great Cold War spy novel, There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a SHU, which was heavily based on a real case that he worked on while working as a counter-intelligence agent in Berlin in the 60s.
The other book about the Casa Loma Orchestra is the culmination of many years of devoted research into that band. He had done an extensive article on Glenn Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra in the last issue of the print version of the Mississippi Rag back in 2006. The book has much more information on that legendary band.
There is just so much potential in my father's life's work that we are very excited about the Archives. Currently, The George A. Borgman Archives has a blog up and running called Yankee Jazz Beat after my father's column of that name.
