George Wein’s very first Newport Jazz Festival, held in 1954, took place on the lawn of the historic Newport Casino (lawn capacity of 5,000), which they rented for two days for a grand total of $350. Performers at that maiden voyage in Newport included Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, George Shearing, Johnny Smith, Oscar Peterson, the Lennie Tristano-Lee Konitz Quintet and the Gene Krupa Trio. Wein’s overall profit for that first year — $142.
The second Newport Jazz Festival was held just a few months after Charlie Parker had passed. The original plan for the was to hold the festivities on the lawn of Belcourt, a late 19th century Moorish-styled castle (lawn capacity of 8,000). After that plan was nixed at the last minute, arrangements were made with the city of Newport to use Freebody Park, a large municipal playground behind the Newport Casino. The lineup of that second Newport festival was a true smorgasbord of jazz from modern groups like the Lee Konitz and the Modern Jazz Quartet to traditionalists like trumpeters Bobby Hackett and Roy Eldridge, four saxophone masters in Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster and Bud Freeman and two big bands in Woody Herman’s Third Herd and the Count Basie Orchestra. The cool school of jazz was represented by Chet Baker’s Quintet and an ensemble led by trombonist Bob Brookmeyer while the hard bop contingent was well represented by Miles Davis leading an all-star ensemble including Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, Percy Heath and Connie Kay and by the Max Roach- Clifford Quintet. Dinah Washington, Wein’s protege Teddi King, Joe Williams and Joe Turner were the vocalists on the bill during that first year. Louis Armstrong closed the proceedings on opening night in regal fashion. The total audience over three days was 27,000.
More than half a century later, Wein is still providing over the Newport Jazz Festival, which is now held in historic Fort Adams State Park, an imposing fortress dating back to the War of 1812 which affords spectacular views of yachts floating on Narragansett Bay. There are now three separate stages at the festival and several of the acts are recorded for live streaming on National Public Radio (check www.npr.org for archived performances by Tony Bennett, Joe Lovano, Brian Blade’s Fellowship, Branford Marsalis, Michel Camilo and others who appeared at the 2009 Newport Jazz Festival). And the spry octagenarian seems as excited by the music today as he was as a teenaged boy back in Newton, Massachusetts. Here’s looking forward to the 2010 Newport Jazz Festival!
Slate music columnist Fred Kaplan has just written the most thoroughly intriguing and persuasive treatise as to why Miles Davis’ 1959 masterpiece Kind of Blue is so universally praised over time. Highly recommended reading. Very scholarly and well thought out with tons of great examples (including sound files from individual tracks of that album and others) to support his argument. Kaplan is also the author of the recently published book, “1959: The Year Everything Changed” (Wiley). In this well-researched tome, he cites several examples, including Davis’ Kind of Blue, along with the unveiling of Frank Lloyd Wright’s radically designed Guggenheim Museum and the publication of William Burroughs’ revolutionary novel “Naked Lunch,” as reasons for making his case for 1959. That year also saw the release of such recording landmarks as Dave Brubeck’s TIme Out and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Maybe Kaplan is really onto something here.
It made us go back into archives to see just what George Wein had booked at the Newport Jazz Festival in that pivotal year (his sixth clambake in Rhode Island). Thursday night opened with the Newport Jazz All-Stars led by saxophonists Buck Clayton and Bud Greeman and featuring trumpeter Ruby Braff, clarinetist Peewee Russell, trombonist Vic Dickenson, pianist Ray Bryant, drummer Buzzy Drootin and Jimmy Rushing on vocals. That’s some ensemble. That day also saw sets by The Four Freshmen (?), George Shearing premiering his new 15-piece orchestra, the Gene Krupa Quartet and culminating with an energzied set from Count Basie and His Orchestra featuring trumpets Snooky Young, Joe Newman and Thad Jones, saxophonists Frank Foster and Frank Wess, trombonists Bennie Powell and Al Grey, guitarist Freddie Green and drummer Sonny Payne. All that music in just one day!
Friday’s festivities included sets by the Kenny Burrell Trio, The Mastersounds (a quartet led by the Montgomery brothers, Buddy and Monk), the Thelonious Monk Quartet (with Arthur Taylor on drums and Sam Jones on bass with Charlie Rouse on tenor sax), the Oscar Peterson Trio, the Modern Jazz Quartet and the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet. Saturday’s highlights included the Jimmy Smith Trio, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Toshiko Akiyoshi Trio, Herbie Mann Quintet, Erroll Garner Trio and the Duke Ellington Orchestra with special guest Jimmy Rushing. And Sunday features Stan Kenton and His Orchestra, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, the Kingston Trio (?), and trombonist Jack Teagarden with cornetist Bobby Hackett. Wow! It certainly was a very good year.
There aren’t too many left. You scan through the pages of the Newport Jazz Festival program from 1954 to 1976 and you see the sheer numbers of players who have passed on (or “grabbed their hat” in jazzbo parlance). Trumpeter and close personal friend of George Wein, the great Bobby Hackett, died in 1970 (which was noted in the festival program that year). From the first festival in ‘54, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Billie Holiday, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, Kenny Clarke, Pee Wee Russell and Eddie Condon have all passed on. Of course, jazz royalty like Duke, Count and Satchmo are gone, as are vocal jazz legends Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. Max Roach passed, as have his fellow drumming stars Buddy Rich, Jo Jones, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams and Gene Krupa. Trumpeters Art Farmer and Freddie Hubbard are gone. Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young are gone. Add the names of Gerry Mulligan, J.J. Johnson, Miles Davis, Erroll Garner, Jimmy Smith, Chet Baker, George Shearing, Woody Herman, Tony Scott, Thelonious Monk, Stan Kenton, Charles Mingus and Stan Getz to the rolls of those who have grabbed their hats.
So who’s left? Who’s still around to tell the tale of the Newport Jazz Festival from ‘back in the day.’ Pianist Dave Brubeck, who played at Wein’s inaugural clambake in ‘54 and who just performed this past weekend at the 2009 Newport Festival, is still active on the scene at age 89. Roy Haynes, who also recently appeared at Newport with his aptly-named Fountain of Youth Band, remains ageless at 84. Pianist and avant garde pioneer Cecil Taylor, who first apeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957, is as energetic and provocative as ever at age 80. And then there’s pianist Dr. Billy Taylor, the renowned educator and purveyor of swinging sounds on New York’s 52nd Street at the height of bebop during the late ’40s. Taylor, a talented player and Art Tatum scholar, made several appearances at the festival, beginning in 1955. At age 88, he’s still swinging hard and on the scene.
And there’s Marian McPartland, who also played at the ‘55 Newport Jazz Festival and recently celebrated her 91th birthday with a gig at Dizzy’s nightclub in Manhattan. And don’t forget the amazing Lee Konitz, who performed on Miles Davis’ 1948 nonet session, Birth of the Cool and was on the bill with his own quartet at Wein’s first festival in 1954. Konitz, at age 81, is a freer and more daring improviser than ever (as evidenced by a recent performance with the great drummer Paul Motian at Birdland in Manhattan). And, of course, there is George Wein himself, who will be celebrating his 84th birthday in October and shows no signs of slowing down at the piano (as he showed during a recent appearance at the Montreal Jazz Festival with the 2009 edition of his George Wein All-Stars.
All of these legendary cats are a part of the great legacy of the Newport Jazz Festival. And they are still out there dealing..still swinging after all these years.
I’m checking out Elvin’s set at Newport, just a few years after he left the fabled John Coltrane Quartet. He’s leading a quintet featuring the great Japanese pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, bassist Wilbur Little and the dangerous two-tenor frontline of George Coleman and Frank Foster. Elvin, of course, fuels the proceedings with his inimitable over-the-barline traversing of the kit while Kikuchi feeds the soloists subversive chordal voicings. Coleman sounds particularly strong here and gets into some of his signature circular breathing. And Foster, who is still in fine form today at age 86, is in peak form here. Great set of heightened modal excursions by a band that was rarely, if ever, documented. This set in July of 1970 came just a few months before the release of the completely psychedelic film, “Zachariah,” which featured some significant screentime by Elvin as a gunslinging cowboy who also plays the drums (check out the mindblowing YouTube clip!).
It’s an amazing how much detective work goes into figuring out who is who on some of these tapes from the Newport Jazz Festival. Take yesterday, for example, when we were trying to solve the riddle from the 1955 festival. There were two unidentified tracks that featured a very smooth sounding alto saxophone fronting a quartet with piano, bass and drums. Now, the alto was not that “dry martini” sound of Paul Demond, but closer to that than the hard-edged school of boppers coming out of Charlie Parker. So my immediate guess was Lee Konitz, who was also on the program. I’ve come to known Lee’s sound over the past 20 years of attending dozens of his gigs (most recently at the 30th edition of the Montreal Jazz Festival) and I think I’d know it anywhere. Certain phrases seemed similar, although the penchant to swing in a conventional sense seemed very un-Lee-like. But this was, after all, 1955. Maybe he was more conservative then. He’s certainly become a lot freer in his expression in the past decade to the point where he walks on stage and plays stream of consciousness from a completely blank slate (kind of like Keith Jarrett at the Koln concert). Anyway, who was this mysterious alto man? Was it Konitz? Turns out, it was Woody Herman, playing alto instead of his customary clarinet. No wonder I was stumped. That’s like trying to guess Jimi Hendrix on harmonica. You would never associate him with that instrument. And so, I was foiled on that one. But happily, I was able to catch the mistake and make the correction (thanks to some research at the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center, where I looked up the Newport Jazz Festival review on microfilm in an August 24, 1955 issue of Down Beat magazine). We’re really getting into some Sherlock Holmes stuff down here in the Vault.
You can just tell, looking at the programming over the years of the Newport Jazz Festiva since its inception in 1954, that “hot jazz” (or Dixieland) held a special place in the heart of impressario George Wein. This was the music of the ‘Roaring ’20s, initially popularized in Chicago by King Oliver’s Creole Band featuring star trumpeter Louis Armstrong. A musical movement further defined by Armstrong’s landmark “Hot Five” and “Hot Seven” sessions of the late ’20s, this music swung hard and defiantly rather than lightly and politely. Essentially the punk music of its day, it attracted hordes of teenagers who instantly connected with the sheer visceral energy and countercultural appeal of this new music and burgeoning scene. Some of those included members of the Austin High Gang, a loose aggregation of aspiring musicians on Chicago’s West Side who fell for King Oliver’s band in the ’20s like teenagers fell for The Who in the ’60s. There was an edge to this upstart music that just could not be denied, and young impressionable aspirants like cornetists Joseph “Muggsy” Spanier and Jimmy McPartland, along with saxophonists Bud Freeman and Frank Teschemacher picked right up on it. Spanier was so taken with both Oliver’s and Armstrong’s high-note trumpet style, infact, that he obsessively followed them from gig to gig on Chicago’s South Side at places like Lincoln Gardens or the Dream Palace.
Spanier would go on to form his Muggsy Spanier’s Ragtime Band, which specialized in hot jazz. The group’s theme song was “Relaxin’ at the Touro,” named for Touro Infirmary in New Orleans, where Muggsy was treated for a perforated ulcer in 1938. At the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival, Wein gathered several of these old school hot jazz specialists, including Spanier, who led an all-star ensemble through a faithful rendition of “Relaxin’ at the Touro.” Things would get pretty rowdy toward the end of the set as New Orleans one-armed trumpeter Wingy Manone, trombonists Lou McGarity and George Brunis, clarinetist Peanuts Hucko, bassist Bob Haggart, drummer Buzzy Drootin and George Wein himself on piano would cut loose on a rousing rendition of the spirited jamming vehicle “That’s A Plenty,” which was for the Dixieland or hot jazz set what “Cherokee” was for the bebop crowd. On these tapes that we’ve been surveying, you can hear Muggsy (or was it George Brunis?) take the mic and yell to the crowd…”Anybody wanna sit in?” and then after a long pause, “Anybody want a drink?”
And away they went.
Audio with 6 plays
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]July 3, 1960. Connover Says It’s over…
Straight off of a 1/2” 3-track master tape… from our Vault to your ears. apologies for the abrupt conclusion, just one of the hazards of analog.
In 1960, the unthinkable happened. After six successful campaigns in Newport, it all came crashing down around George Wein and the Newport Jazz Festival board. Apparently, by 1959, young people (and not necessarily jazz fans) had caught on to the fact that Newport pubs were staying open until 4 or 5 a.m during festival week, and the additional fact that few bars were checking for ID. So under-aged college kids came in droves from all over New England to get boozed up and party, make out on the beaches and eventually crash in Touro Park while leaving refuse strewn all over town. One Boston newpaper columnist surmised at the time that “these kids have begun comparing Newport at festival time to Ft. Lauderdale during spring break.”
The ruckus never entered the festival gates insides Freebody Park, since few of the troublemakers had any real feeling for jazz. “Nevertheless, we recognized the rowdiness of the kids outside as a threat to the festival,” writes Wein in his autobiography.
The problem escalated and reached a critical peak on the evening of Saturday, July 2, 1960, when a large mobe of inebriated college kids — estimates ran anywhere from 3,000 to 12,000 — began charging the Newport police force, hurling full cans of beer at them like grenades. The conflict erupted into a full-scale riot just outside Freebody Park. Some of the kids tried to storm the festival gate but were repelled. Firemen vainly attempted to disperse the crowd with hoses. The violent throng began smashing store and car windows along Bellevue Avenue, the city’s main strip of commerce, until state troopers were deployed.
The following morning, the city council held an emergency meeting that would last two hours. Council members decried the disastrous events from the night before. At the end of the meeting, the council voted 4-3 in favor of revoking Newport Jazz Festival, Inc.’s entertainment license. That Sunday afternoon, distinguished master of ceremonies Willis Connover from Voice of America Radio broke the news to the crowd in his rich baritone that the evening concerts were being cancelled and that patrons were instructed to return to their homes as soon as possible. In an obvious ad lib, Connover reserved his harshest criticism for the “pseudo beatniks and rock ‘n’ roll escapees venting their animal instincts that qualifies them for entry into a zoo rather than a school.”
And with that, the Newport Jazz Festival was dead. But like the phoenix that rose from the ashes, George Wein would be back with a bigger and better festival in 1962.(see audio file above)
As we get deeper and deeper into the process of digitally transferring and cataloging these achival tapes of the Newport Jazz Festival from 1954-1976, certain patterns begin to emerge. The sound of the crowds assembled at George Wein’s annual clambake have by now become familiar along with the heavily accented Bostonese of the impresario himself as he makes announcements between acts from the main stage. By now we have become accostumed to the familiar Wein formula of something old (“I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” by trumpeters Muggsy Spanier and Wingy Manone and a contingent of cats from New Orleans), some new (provocative sets from jazz revolutionaries like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Steve Lacy, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra), something borrowed (tributes to Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington) and something blue (rousing sets from the Muddy Waters band, Jimmy Rushing, B.B. King, Big Maybelle, Joe Turner).
We’ve heard various sets of music by Dave Brubeck, Lee Konitz, Chet Baker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Gerry Mulligan, Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson spanning three decades, and we’ve heard rare one-off performances by the likes of Dinah Washington, Clifford Brown, Nina Simone, Clifford Brown, Billie Holiday and Willie “The Lion” Smith.
After entering into this treasure trove of archival tapes from the Newport Jazz Festival near the beginning (1955, the second year of Wein’s great experiment on the banks of Narrragansett Bay in Rhode Island), we jumped a decade to the so-called “golden years” of the festival. By this time, the naysayers had been driven away and the Newport city council sufficiently placated so that George’s festival was firmly established as an institution and THE place to go in July (the 1958 documentary film “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” had something to do with popularizing the event beyond its initial fan base in New England).
So here we all now, dealing with ‘64 and ‘65…one year more amazing than the next. By 1964, the same year the Beatles hit Stateside, the bossa nova craze was in full swing, so Stan Getz’s appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival with Astrud “The Girl From Ipanema” Gilberto seemed timely. (Their Verve album, Getz/Gilberto, had been released the previous year and quickly ascended the pop music charts). That same year saw riveting performances by the George Russell Sextet featuring tenor saxophonist John Gilmore (on loan from Sun Ra’s Arkestra), trumpeter Thad Jones, bassist Steve Swallow, drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath and vocalist Sheila Jordan. Other memorable sets from ‘64 were turned in by gospel singer and guitar slinger Sister Rosetta Tharpe, iconic pianist-composer Thelonious Monk, drummer Max Roach with his wife Abbey Lincoln performing a politically-charged and controversial “The Freedom Suite,” a gala tribute to Bird and a captivating performance by a new star on the jazz firmament, Hammond B-3 organist Jimmy Smith.
Stay tuned for 1965. To quote Sinatra: “It was a very good year.”
Completed MP3 files are now coming fast and furious here at Wolfgang’s Vault. With a staff of seven or eight keen-eared young staffers listening intensively up on the ninth floor, we’re zipping through whole sets of music, night by night, year by year. The classic 1955 shows (the second year of George Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival) went by in a flash. Highlights that year included a killer set by the great Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet, powerhouse big band sets by Woody Herman’s Third Herd and the Count Basie Orchestra, plus brilliant sets by the Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Quintet. So much music, so little time. I’m just trying to play catch-up now, but I’m falling way behind the beat. As soon as I tackle one night of music from 1955, for instance, the eager staff upstairs is already feeding me with sounds from the 1964 Newport Festival and the 1970 Newport Festival (the year that George Wein orchestrated a gala 70th birthday celebration for Louis Armstrong). Meanwhile, I can’t wait to listen to the controversial and supposedly disastrous 1969 Newport Jazz Festival — the year that George “sold out” to rock and booked Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, James Brown, Johnny Winter, Sly and the Family Stone and the electric Miles Davis band. YEAH!!!!
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