This time last week we were talking about the birth of the Newport Jazz Festival. When the first one took place in the summer of 1954 it brought 13,000 young people to the Rhode Island town.
Some of the older residents of Newport were not pleased with the festival being there at all. Hard as it may be to believe today, jazz was thought of as wild music that appealed only to rowdy young non-conformists, communists probably, and established Newporter’s didn’t want it or them in their town. In talking about the festival one writer pointed out that while jazz has always “idealized both diversity and democratization” Newport traditionally was pretty much the exact opposite.
According to Dan Morgenstern, who in 2007 was the Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers, staging the festival there in Newport gave the music a high-class association that it most certainly had never had previously.
The next year, 1955, the festival expanded to three full days of music and featured an even greater lineup with Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown and Max Roach, Dinah Washington, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and others. Miles thought that his performance there that year transformed his career. “As much as I liked the music I was doing,” he said, “a lot of critics probably still thought I was a junkie. I wasn’t real popular at the time, but that began to change after I played at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955.” Perhaps most importantly, his performance that year at Newport led to him signing with Columbia Records. In 1956, Duke Ellington played a set with his band and, like Miles the year before, people believed that it resurrected his career.
By 1960 it had expanded to four days and that year featured some blues players like Ray Charles, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker alongside jazz stalwarts like Oscar Peterson, Cannonball Adderley, Dizzy, and Dave Brubeck. At the end of the 1960s, some rock acts were being blended in with the jazz and soul and blues acts and the crowds got a lot bigger.
In 1972, after some trouble with crowds in Newport, director George Wein moved the festival to New York City. It finally returned in 1981 with an incredible lineup entirely of jazz performers and with a stage set up inside Fort Adams, just south of the harbor. It’s been held at Fort Adams State Park ever since. These days, there are jazz festivals all over the place. But Newport, Rhode Island is where they began.
