Newport, Rhode Island is the home of the U.S. Naval War College and my work with it takes me up there occasionally. Over the years it’s become one of my favorite little towns. I don’t think there’s any place more picturesque if you like the water. Back during the Gilded Age in the later 19th century, it was one of the very trendy summering spots for the super wealthy. The summer resort mansions of families like the Vanderbilt’s, the Astor’s, the Morgan’s—diminutively and ridiculously referred to as “cottages”—are still tourist attractions. In part because of that, as a town it’s always punched above its weight culturally, you might say.
One of the events that I’ve always wanted to attend is the famed Newport Jazz Festival, one of the most well-known events in the entire jazz world.
The founder of the festival was a woman named Elaine Guthrie Lorillard, who was born in Maine in 1914. Her mother was a professional pianist, and she herself attended the New England Conservatory of Music. During WWII she joined the Red Cross and wound up in Naples, Italy teaching music to orphans. While in Naples, she met a lieutenant in the US Army named Louis Lorillard, who happened to be heir to the Lorillard Tobacco fortune. They went to jazz clubs there in Naples together and she fell in love with the music. And, apparently with Louis as well. They were married in 1946. When they came back, they became one of the young power couples in Newport.
The story goes that in the summer of 1953, she was at a classical music festival there in Newport when the man sitting next to her, who was the head of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, remarked that it would be great if there something like this for jazz. “That’s another music form that’s worth a big-time festival,” he reportedly said.
Elaine couldn’t have agreed more. She and her husband knew a man named George Wein, who owned a jazz club called Storyville in nearby Boston, and they asked him if he would be interested in putting together an outdoor jazz festival in Newport the next summer. They would provide the funding. He thought it was a great idea and assembled an incredible roster of performers including Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and others.
On July 17 and 18 at the Newport Casino (which in the Gilded Age was the absolute center of Newport high society’s social life) the first jazz festival took place. Let’s hang out here a little bit more next week.
