Who What Where Why: Jazz
In 1953, for the first time more than one million air conditioners were sold, but demand still exceeded supply, so the summer imperative was get to a beach out of town.
In 1954 the sophisticated young Lorillards, heirs to the Reynolds tobacco fortune, asked scrappy young Boston entrepreneur George Wein to come to Newport, Rhode Island, seabreeze-blessed vacation seat of the auspiciously wealthy since the Gilded Age, to produce jazz concerts as an alternative to the starchy classical recitals in the town's mega-mansions that had passed until then for entertainment. In 1955, with jazz unchallenged as the world's hippest music, Wein's Newport Jazz Festival went public, subsequently re-launching the careers of Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, establishing Charles Mingus as a rebel, drawing not-exactly-jazz artists such as Mahalia Jackson and Chuck Berry into the fold, providing a prestigious new site for live in-concert recordings, not so incidentally integrating a previously lily white social scene and completing the birth of the jazz festival.
Despite fluctuations of corporate and local support, Wein's event-for the past 21 years officially the JVC Jazz Festival-Newport-has prospered and survives, over two days last weekend presenting 29 acts at three stages from 11:30 to 7 p.m. This format-one relatively modest charge ($70 in advance) for seating on the grass at a state park promontory jutting into the bay, music, crafts and food booths, people-watching and sail boats offshore all included-is genuinely festive, not simply a marketing strategy for promoting separate concert hall programs under one advertising umbrella, as at the JVC Jazz Festival-New York. Multi-act outdoor popular music fests now abound, with one of Wein's lieutenants estimating their number world-wide in the thousands. Prompting the thought: Do New Yorkers have to make the 150-mile trek up I-95 for this specific pleasure?
Last year's Newport schedule was a knockout, as befit its 50th anniversary. Highlights included voracious saxophonist James Carter's 33-chorus solo over the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra on Ellington's "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" (Paul Gonsalves' 26-chorus version at Newport in 56 being the mark to top), and a rare performance by Ornette Coleman's quartet that had the sea gulls flocking in from the water to hear what was up. This year's sched was eminently respectable, with Jon Faddis, Dave Holland, Joe Lovano with Dave Liebman, Dave Brubeck, Joshua Redman, Chick Corea, Charles Lloyd, Roy Haynes (raucously celebrating his 80th birthday) on the main stage, and equally proven artists Carla Bley, McCoy Tyner, Lovano with pianist Hank Jones, Bill Frisell, Don Byron, Larry Coryell, Gary Burton and T.S. Monk, among others, in two smaller, tented venues.
The reason I'm not going to detail the sets is there were really no surprises, or huge triumphs, least not to jaded ole me. Bright moments: trumpeter Marsalis's extremely detailed and articulate performance of his retooled post-bop, as documented on his upcoming CD, In The House of Tribes, was hands-down the most concentrated, serious jazz of the weekend. Big waste: Wynton's first-ever duet with Brubeck was thrown away on a corny version of "Take the A Train."
There were earnest tributes to Dizzy Gillespie and Cannonball Adderley, references aplenty to John Coltrane (by his son Ravi, as well as Lloyd and the fearsome Lovano-Liebman frontline) and Thelonious Monk (by Coryell, who said, "The more mistakes you make, the more Monkish his songs sound"). There was an unceasing high-level of professional self-expression. But there was an equal sense this has been done before, much closer to home. In fact, the upcoming 13th annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, free in Harlem's Marcus Garvey Park on Saturday, August 26 and Downtown's Tompkins Square Park on Sunday the 27 promises sets by saxophonist Bobby Watson, Odean Pope's Saxophone Choir, pianist John Hicks with David "Fathead" Newman, among others, of roughly equivalent jazz joy. The sound is happenin', the crowd is cool, the price is right, and you can get there by subway.
The thrills of baking in the hot sun or settled haze with a listless crowd of semi-clad strangers, then wandering through pleasantly quaint if predictably franchised central Newport, should not be denied, but may not justify the expense of renting a car for more than $100 a day ($50-plus for a full gas tank) or lodging in motels that pump their prices for the weekend. Of course, it's great to hang with friends from Boston, who brag of being a one-hour drive from home. But with thousands of jazz fests now, it's sure cheaper and easier (and given today's plentitude of talented jazzers getting booked, seldom less esthetically satisfying) to stick around the city. Especially now that supply meets demand.