Arthur Briggs was an African-American bandleader who worked primarily in Europe. He first came to Europe in 1919 with Will Marion Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra in 1919. In 1922 he returned to Europe and formed the Savoy Syncopators Orchestra in Brussels.

The band played residencies in Vienna, Berlin and Paris throughout the 1920s. In 1928 the band broke up. Briggs recorded again in 1929 in Paris under the name of the Orchestre Arthur Briggs and his Boys. Briggs then joined the Noble Sissle Orchestra, which played a long residency in London. He eventually returned to America with Sissle.

In 1931 he returned to Europe and led bands in Paris, recording with Maceo Jefferson, Coleman Hawkins, Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. During the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two, Briggs stayed in Paris, and was captured and imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, but survived the ordeal and after his liberation continued to play Jazz in Europe until the mid-1960s.

Thanks to Al Simmons for his help with the recordings on this page.

Red Hot Jazz Archive

Web

Redhotjazz.com was a pioneering website during the "Information wants to be Free" era of the 1990s. In that spirit we are recovering the lost data from the now defunct site and sharing it with you.
Most of the music in the archive is in the form of MP3s hosted on Archive.org or the French servers of Jazz-on-line.com where this music is all in the public domain.
Files unavailable from those sources we host ourselves. They were made from original 78 RPM records in the hands of private collectors in the 1990s who contributed to the original redhotjazz.com. They were hosted as .ra files originally and we have converted them into the more modern MP3 format. They are of inferior quality to what is available commercially and are intended for reference purposes only. In some cases a Real Audio (.ra) file from Archive.org will download. Don't be scared! Those files will play in many music programs, but not Windows Media Player.