A tribute to Dennis Huggard, jazz archivist – without him, Blue Smoke would have been a much thinner and less accurate book. New Zealand’s popular music history is eternally in his debt.
Dennis Huggard
The way New Zealand’s popular music history is understood was changed by a tireless jazz fan in a West Auckland garage, clipping, copying and sorting articles from newspapers and magazines, editing and transcribing tapes, transferring archival audio from analogue to digital.
Dennis Huggard spent his working life in the RNZAF and at Air New Zealand. When he retired in 1988 he was looking for a hobby that involved his first love – jazz – and began cataloguing every mention of every New Zealand jazz musician he could find. […]
