| Putting a thing like this on is an endless series of little headaches, a parade of aspirins. |
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Miles Davis at the Newport Jazz Festival, Newport, R.I., July 1967.
(Dan Farrell/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images)
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“Putting a thing like this on is an endless series of little headaches, a parade of aspirins.”
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Jazzapalooza
It's a measure of the towering influence of GEORGE WEIN's career in music festivals that his founding of the NEW ORLEANS JAZZ & HERITAGE FESTIVAL gets only a glancing mention, if it's mentioned at all, in his obituaries. "He also produced..." begins the one sentence the New York Times devotes to that accomplishment. His hometown Boston Globe namedrops it in the 11th paragraph, in the middle of a list of other fests his company was involved in, and moves on. And not without good reason. The godfather of the outdoor music fest, a jazz pianist who once described his business acumen as "I could always add and subtract," died Monday at age 95, leaving behind his signature jazz and folk festivals in Newport, R.I., a suite of other jazz festivals around the world, and a legacy of rock, pop, hip-hop, dance, country, jazz, blues and everything else festivals that are all, in a way, his children and grandchildren. "Without Wein," jazz critic GENE SANTORO once wrote, "everything from WOODSTOCK to JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER might have happened differently."
The NEWPORT JAZZ FESTIVAL, which Wein launched in 1954, and NEWPORT FOLK FESTIVAL, which followed in 1959, were the site of monumental performances by the likes of MILES DAVIS, BILLIE HOLIDAY, DUKE ELLINGTON and BOB DYLAN. It wouldn't be exaggerating to say a handful of them changed the course of music history. Wein presented jazz on a scale no one had tried before—"out of urban nightclubs and into the sunlight, introducing it to new audiences at a time when rock-and-roll was beginning to take over the airwaves," wrote the Washington Post's MATT SCHUDEL. Among his innovations, beyond his relentless pursuit of A-list artists, were intentionally booking disparate acts who would draw different kinds of fans and presenting performances on multiple stages at the same time. Also: corporate sponsorships and radius clauses.
He had his detractors. Wein's invitations to non-jazz artists like CHUCK BERRY in 1958 and LED ZEPPELIN and JAMES BROWN in 1969 to play Newport Jazz offended purists, and CHARLES MINGUS and MAX ROACH once staged a competing festival in Newport to protest booking choices they thought were too safe. Wein's fests were twice banned by the city of Newport, once for a full decade, because of unruly festivalgoers. He moved the jazz fest to New York City in the 1970s, where it remained as a major presence in the New York jazz scene even after Newport welcomed him back in 1981. He was known for remembering his critics but he never let them slow him down. He created the New Orleans Jazz Fest in 1970, renaming and converting a fledgling festival into the jazz and multicultural behemoth it is today. And the Playboy Jazz Festival and the JVC Jazz Festival and a not so small empire's worth of others. (Those critics couldn't slow down jazz itself either. MILES DAVIS was at Newport in 1969, too, and the rock bands he watched, while standing in the wings with Wein, proved famously influential.)
It's been a rough month, to say the last, for the great curators of jazz. News of Wein's death comes last than a week after the passing of PHIL SCHAAP, with whom he shares one notable, if coincidental, connection: Schaap's childhood mentor PHILLY JOE JONES. Even after he got into the music business with the Boston jazz club STORYVILLE, Wein (who was raised in my hometown of Newton, Mass.) maintained his dreams of being a performer, and he was known to sit in with musicians at his club—until he ran into Jones, as the Boston Globe recalls: "'George, you gotta make your mind up whether you wanna run a nightclub or play piano,' Jones told him. 'I'm sorry, man, but I just can't use you.'"
Wein did make up his mind, though he never stopped performing or recording. His one regret, he told writer MARC MYERS, was "not making more records." RIP.
Etc Etc Etc
Oy, NICKI MINAJ... Oy oy, JIMMY FALLON, who picked on a couple unknown musicians, which was cruel, and free jazz great PETER BRÖTZMANN, which was embarrassing, last week in a literally tasteless skit called the "Do Not Play List." "We both know that the world is full of ignorants and stupidos, one more or less, who cares," Brötzmann tells Rolling Stone. Who cares indeed, but wouldn't it be funny if musicians and their teams boycotted that stupid show?... TODD RUNDGREN isn't specifically boycotting the ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME, which is inducting him in October. He's just not going... SONOS is raising prices, citing supply-chain issues... The great LA indie venue the BOOTLEG THEATER, which didn't survive the pandemic, has been converted into an eclectic performance space called 2220 ARTS + ARCHIVES that looks fantastic.
Rest in Peace
Philadelphia music fixture JONATHAN VALANIA, who wrote about music for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Weekly and several magazines and founded the music and culture site Phawker. In an earlier life, he was lead singer of the Allentown, Pa., garage-rock band the Psyclone Rangers... Jazz saxophonist JEMEEL MOONDOC... Prog-rock bassist ROGER NEWELL, the first musician to ever play a triple-neck bass... Los Angeles jazz singer RUTH OLAY.
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| Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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The New York Times |
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| He brought jazz (and later folk music) to Newport, R.I., and made festivals as important as nightclubs and concert halls on jazz musicians’ itineraries. |
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The Boston Globe |
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A watershed moment in Ellington's career, with a superhuman assist from tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves.
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| Video of the day |
| "Jazz on a Summer's Day" |
| Kino Lorber |
| Bert Stern and Aram Avakian's classic concert film, documenting the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. |
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YouTube |
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Bert Stern and Aram Avakian's classic concert film, documenting the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.
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