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Frank Kofsky
Frank Kofsky (1935–1997), who lectured and wrote on the history of jazz, was a biting critic of an economic system that allowed recording companies, club owners, and festival promoters to make millions from the works of jazz artists, while paying the creators of the music a pittance. From 1969 until...
Frank Kofsky (1935–1997), who lectured and wrote on the history of jazz, was a biting critic of an economic system that allowed recording companies, club owners, and festival promoters to make millions from the works of jazz artists, while paying the creators of the music a pittance.
From 1969 until his death, Kofsky was a history professor at California State University at Sacramento and an active partisan of civil rights movements and to end the US war against Vietnam. He spent the better part of the 1970s fighting to hold on to his teaching job. Among the stated reasons that the university sought to deny him tenure and fire him was the charge that he was "unduly pro-black" in "behavior and grading."
Other works by Frank Kofsky include an assessment of the Cold War entitled Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948; the study Lenny Bruce: The Comedian as Social Critic and Secular Moralist; John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s; Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music; Black Music, White Business; and numerous op-ed articles for the San Francisco Examiner over the last few years.