Word: wein
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...SOUND of jazz filled New York last week as George Wein's twentieth Newport Jazz Festival finished its second year in its transplanted home. The festival, running from June 29 to July 8, brought together over 500 jazz musicians in a variety of settings and formats. From concerts in Harlem's Apollo Theater to Carnegie and Philharmonic Halls to the Hudson River boat rides on the Staten Island Ferry, the festival covered the city. Because of its magnitude and dimension, the phenomenon can not be wholly comprehended or fully interpreted. Despite the fact that jazz reached its apex...
...event was called the Newport Jazz Festival New York. It was a massive transplant of the same Newport Festival that rotund former Jazz Pianist George Wein, 46, had run for 18 years in a large field hard by Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay. In recent years, with rock festivals failing on all sides, Newport had become a new chosen land of the Huns of Aquarius. Last year, when a noisy and violent horde broke through a chain-link fence and overran the paying customers while Dionne Warwicke was singing, Wein had enough; he canceled the show. A few days...
Actually, as Wein soon realized, what he could do was to move down the coast a bit and make New York the Bayreuth of jazz. In Rhode Island, he says, "they were never interested in the artistic content of the festival, only how much money it would bring in. What we found out when we moved to New York was that the world was listening, if Rhode Island wasn...
What the world was listening to reflected Wein's own solid, mainstream musical tastes. The emphasis was on established and often middle-aged jazz figures, so much so that Trumpeter Miles Davis absented himself from the week's proceedings, complaining of "comfortable" and "Uncle Tom" aspects in Wein's programming-and about the fact that he had been invited to play two concerts in one day but was only going to get one fee ($7,500), like everyone else...
...were more contemporary accents drowned out. The 30-year-old Guitarist John McLaughlin led his Mahavishnu Orchestra through a shattering set of jazz-rock at Carnegie Hall. Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard turned in a fiery performance as a stand-in for Miles Davis. And the "Connoisseur Concerts" that Wein booked into Carnegie Hall presented such acquired tastes as the abstract expressionism of Pianist Cecil Taylor. In all, there was enough youth and promise on stage -and in the audiences-to make the festival a meeting ground not only of the past and present, but of the past and future as well...