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NEWPORT JAZZ FESTIVAL

Respectability

Jazz was traditionally a music too closely associated with sin and race to attract an establishment following. Born in southern whorehouses and bar-rooms and developed by black musicians with a reputation for intemperance and licentiousness, its pulsating rhythms and libertine melodies had the right degree of naughtiness for a young dance crowd, but most people felt it was inappropriate for the concert stage and quite likely immoral in a nightclub setting. It was therefore mildly scandalous when social scions Elaine and Louis L. Lorillard of Newport, Rhode Island, announced plans to stage the first annual Newport Jazz Festival in mid July 1954 at the seventy-five-year-old Newport Casino, an exclusive open-air club founded by Mr. Lorillard's great-grandfather Pierre, the tobacco baron.

Six Thousand Fans

Time magazine reported that "Newport's narrow streets were thronged with loudshirted bookie types from Broadway, young intellectuals in need of haircuts, crew-cut Ivy Leaguers, sailors, Harlem girls with extravagant hairdos, and high-school girls in shorts." Six thousand jazz fans paid three, four, or five dollars for a ticket to the two-day program that included jazz traditionalists such as Eddie Condon, Pee Wee Russell, and Wild Bill Davison, as well as modernists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, and Gerry Mulligan. To keep the event in perspective, the festival ended with an intellectual forum about the origins of jazz and its significance.

The Second Year

In 1955 the board of governors of the casino refused to lease the facility to Lorillard and festival producer George Wein for the second festival. The grass tennis courts had been nearly ruined by the 1954 crowd, and sanitary facilities were inadequate, they complained. Elaine Lorillard pronounced festival opponents "socially insecure"; Lorillard announced a new venue. For $22,500 he bought Belcourt, the huge but run-down Newport estate of Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who had himself shocked the blue bloods half a century earlier when he married the divorced wife of William K. Vanderbilt. When Belcourt neighbors complained about the prospect of loud music and rambunctious crowds, a compromise was struck: performances would be held at the city-owned baseball field, Freebody Park, and Belcourt would be reserved for festival-related lectures and forums.

The Happy Sounds Festival

The 1955 festival brought twenty-six thousand jazz fans and two hundred musicians to Newport for a three-day program. The festival was opened by Rhode Island's Sen. Theodore Green and closed by Count Basie's band in a session that, according to Whitney Ballieti, "tore at its jazz so hard one felt as though he had been literally banged in the chest."

The Curse of Success

By 1957 the Newport Jazz Festival had established itself firmly, drawing crowds of some forty-five thousand and operating on a self-sustaining financial basis. But for established musicians the festival was beginning to lose its luster. They complained about the inferior sound system, the lack of intimacy in a ballpark setting, and the restricted stage time—twenty-five minutes for headliners in 1957.

Jazz Supermarket

Louis Armstrong responded rudely, most thought, to a fifty-seventh-birthday celebration arranged for him, refusing to vary the program of songs that he had played without alteration for the two previous years. He even abruptly terminated his performance after he was presented a birthday cake and informed that the festival had instituted a scholarship in his honor. Miles Davis called the festival a jazz supermarket, and Paul Desmond, alto saxophonist for the Dave Brubeck Quartet, said in 1958, "Next year maybe they could arrange to have Eisenhower," since everybody else of note seemed to be present. Elaine Lorillard responded, "We see no point in jazz being private and ingrown."

Resolution

Jazzmen did, however, and by the end of the decade the Newport Jazz Festival was on its way to being reserved for young performers who needed exposure, senior musicians resting on their laurels, and journeymen down on their luck.