The Birth of the Newport Jazz Festival by Burt Goldblatt

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Judging from the following excerpts from Burt Goldblatt’s Newport Jazz Festival: The Illustrated History [1977], jealous rivalries among the wealthy “high society” set in the 1950s seems to have played a significant role in the advent of the Newport Jazz Festival.

Boredom and ennui were also involved to some degree.

John Maxon who was the director of the Rhode Island School of Design during this period and the originator of the idea of a Jazz Festival in Newport is quoted as having said: “The thing which I think is particularly important is that Newport is a very strange place. They really are terribly unimpressed. They're bored and worldly, but they are nice people, and they're terribly grateful for something new.…”

"The Festival was a peculiar phenomenon of the fifties. It could never have happened in the sixties, and it happened at a particular point in the evolution of popular music. It happened in Newport, and that was the only place it could have happened." [Emphasis mine]

With Jazz Festival now a commonplace occurrence on an international level, I thought it might be fun to have a look back at the granddaddy of them all and how it all began from an observer who was there from the very beginning.

“During the summer of 1953 retired philanthropist George Henry Warren, a New Yorker whose family had been summer residents of Newport for many years, and his wife hosted a garden luncheon at their home near the Old Stone Mill. Among the dozen guests was the director of the Rhode Island School of Design, John Maxon, who remembers the occasion quite vividly: "It was a thoroughly proper Newport summer lunch, with the least likely people ever to be involved in jazz. George Warren would have had his back north. It was a curving table, arranged so that the sun would not be in the guests' eyes." The Louis P. Lorillards were among the guests. Louis was tall, round-faced, and balding. "Always impeccably dressed, but a bland and colorless guy."

In a Festival board meeting report of December 5, 1955, Lorillard made this evaluation of his position: "I am President for some reason. Probably because of being called a producer. If anything goes wrong, I have to produce something out of my own pocket to make up the difference. But I am not a technician in jazz. Basically my job is to pull things together. I don't intend to keep this job forever. I am sure that if it is deemed necessary, a professional musician or technician in jazz will gladly take my job over. Then I can go back to the travel business where I belong."

During the summer of 1953 the Lorillards had helped in the presentation of two concerts by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, trying to bring some life into the community. The concerts, planned to be held out of doors at the Newport Casino, were forced by inclement weather to be held in the casino theater, which had poor acoustics. Elaine Lorillard later commented, "Hardly anyone came." The concerts were a financial flop. In addition, as Maxon said, "While it was not a pickup orchestra, I don't think the concerts could have been held any other place that would have made it sound any better.

"At the luncheon, Mrs. Lorillard, sitting on my right, was complaining about the way the concerts were going. Brahms was being discussed, and I remember saying, 'Well, why do you put on a music festival for which there is no particular desire or reason, which are the standard things you hear anyhow? Do you really think people want to hear what they undoubtedly hear in the wintertime? They would like to hear something different. If you want to do something, why don't you put on a jazz festival? It would be a wild success. You can't fail.’ 

The great virtue of the Jazz Festival in its early days was putting on material that hadn't been heard too often. I think there was a great deal of naivete on the part of Mr. Wein, and that primordial innocence on the part of the city fathers of Newport. The thing which I think is particularly important is that Newport is a very strange place. They really are terribly unimpressed. They're bored and worldly, but they are nice people, and they're terribly grateful for something new. The colonists' reaction to the jazz festival, not the city fathers', is rather like their reaction to the annual hurricane; it was something over which they had very little control, and you went on with what you had to do. I never knew whether Louis or Elaine were remotely interested in it or whether it was a permutation of their relationship. Elaine had her motivations, and I'm sure that Louis had his."

(John Hammond, jazz critic and confidant of many well-known musicians, said later, "Louis couldn't carry a tune, except for a couple of things played by Count Basie.")

"The Festival was a peculiar phenomenon of the fifties. It could never have happened in the sixties, and it happened at a particular point in the evolution of popular music. It happened in Newport, and that was the only place it could have happened."

Patrick O'Higgins, author of the best seller Madame (about Helena Rubinstein, whose advisor he was), also handled publicity for the Festival for three years. In a recent interview he stated, "The Lorillards were eminently respectable in every way, but Elaine wasn't liked by most of the ladies because they feared her, or they feared that she was cleverer or more amusing or whatever. I think what happened was, they said we'll all go to this bloody Festival because it's going to be a terrible flop. Mrs. Lorillard was going to be chased out of town, and much to their surprise it had the exact opposite effect."

George Frazier (former entertainment editor of Life and columnist on the entertainment world), in Esquire, August 1955, quoted George Wein, the Festival's director, on the Newport old guard: "They resented jazz musicians coming into Newport, but they'll never be able to do anything about it, because the Festival is backed by one of their most respected members, Louis Lorillard, who will fight for his convictions even at the expense of being branded a traitor to his own class."

“Elaine Lorillard," Patrick O'Higgins said, "has always remained a marvelous friend to me and I love her dearly, but in a way I think that it was Elaine's revenge on Newport. In a strange way she just wanted to let Mrs. Van Alen [society matron from one of Newport's first families] know. 'Look what I can do.' I've been on Bailey's Beach [the strip of sand and rocks reserved only for the wealthy] and seen ladies suddenly disappear into a cabana so they wouldn't have to say hello to her."

John Maxon laughed. "It always amused me that innocent chit chat had more effect on more people than anything else I've ever done. The truth of the matter is, I did give Elaine the idea, and from then on it went." When I asked John Maxon why he never attended a Festival, he replied. "The idea simply never occurred to me."

Elaine thought about Maxon's suggestion, discussing it with her husband over the rest of the summer. In the fall she made periodic trips to Boston. "Eddie Condon was the only jazz person I knew socially," she said. "I was trying to put the idea into a more concrete form and Eddie suggested Ernie Anderson [producer of jazz concerts and friend to many musicians]. He sent a wire off to Ernie, but he was off in Europe, so I got in touch with a very good friend of mine, Sylvia Marlowe, a harpsichordist. I knew that at one time she had played some boogie-woogie, so that she was sympatico with jazz. I came to New York to see her, and she arranged a meeting with John Hammond. When we discussed the project, he was very enthusiastic."

Hammond made a number of suggestions about who could pull it all together, and among the names was George Wein's. An interesting combination, Mrs. Lorillard and Wein were polar opposites in almost everything except their interest in jazz. She is pretty, lively, and full of life. Patrick O'Higgins described Wein as "shrewd, tough, but there is a great deal of sweetness in him, and he does know his business. He's a jazz impresario the way Mr. Zeigfeld was a Broadway impresario. I've seen George Wein at work, and I've always admired the way he conducted himself. I think he always treated everyone fairly."

For years Wein has been a source of controversy in the music community. He has a saving sense of humor and a guttural, choppy laugh, but his earthiness rubs many people the wrong way. His organizational ability and shrewdness are as undeniable as his lack of sensitivity in his dealings in the music business.

Willis Conover's may be the voice more people hear around the world than any other. Five nights a week, in every part of the world except the United States, he is the jazz voice of the Voice of America. Willis also was the master of ceremonies of the Newport Jazz Festival from 1955 to 1962. In 1957, he was elected to its board of directors. He also supervised the recording and broadcasting of the Festival for overseas transmission. Conover offered this analysis: "George, after all, has proved that he knew what he was doing because he's now running the Newport Jazz Festival. I think there's no question that from the beginning George felt that the Newport Festival was George Wein's festival; at least he always said, 'my festival,' 'my musicians,' my this, and my that. Occasionally my jesting with people takes a cruel turn, and I'm afraid I did it with him when I said, 'Please don't say "my master of ceremonies" to me.'

"My objection to George as a programmer has been that he makes decisions that to me seem influenced by questions of publicity rather than of good programing. George is a sucker for a celebrity, particularly a celebrity outside of jazz. He doesn't need to be. He's a celebrity. He has a lot on the ball. Just as he didn't have to in the old days try so hard to prove that he wasn't cultured, by talking and acting like one of us low-class jazz types. This to me was a kind of insult to the musicians, to say I'm just as bad as you are, in effect. It seems to me, and I exaggerate the point, that if Jesus came back to earth, he would try to get him to get up and MC one night, even if he knew nothing about jazz."

John Hammond said in a later interview: "I have never known George to retain animosity. I can cite case after case where people have screamed at George and written horrible things about him and said worse things, and it rolls off George's back. Frankly, I think George is one hell of a guy. George is a man of tremendous integrity. He has taken some of the most terrible financial beatings I've ever seen and bounced right back. When they closed up the Festival that last year at Newport, he was a broken-hearted man, but he bounced right back. You've got to be tough to run a festival."

George Wein ran a jazz club called Storyville, located in the Hotel Copley Square in Boston. He had been playing piano in a group led by the brilliant jazz drummer Jo Jones, who had sparked Count Basie's great orchestra during the thirties and forties. A few days after they had played together Jo put his arm around his employer's shoulder in a fatherly gesture and declared, "George, you have to make up your mind whether you want to run a nightclub or play the piano. I'm sorry, but I just can't use you." Wein later laughed about the incident, agreeing wholeheartedly that he had played badly.

On the other hand, Budd Johnson, the fine tenor sax man and fatherly figure in the jazz world, told me, "George is all right as long as he's doing his own thing. He plays very good in his bag. I've never seen him force himself on anybody."

"I met George on one of my Boston trips, two weeks before the George Henry Warren party," Elaine Lorillard said. “After dinner with my brother [Tom Guthrie], we went at his suggestion to Storyville to hear some jazz."

At that meeting also was Donald Born, professor of English and the humanities at Boston University. Tom Guthrie had been a student of Born's, and he introduced Elaine to the professor. When Born commiserated with her about the failure of her Philharmonic concerts, Elaine replied that she would be much more interested in putting on a jazz festival. Born knew George Wein and brought him over to the bar to meet them.

Wein acted with complete indifference to the suggestion that a jazz festival be organized. In the August 18, 1967. issue of Holiday magazine Wein described that meeting: "There was this society woman at the club that night talking to me about jazz concerts and Newport. I'd never thought about Newport before then, but I figured it might work, and I knew I wanted to do more in life than own a jazz club, and so I kept saying, 'Sure, sure, but call me in a couple of days if you're really interested,' half knowing that these people wander into the club and unburden themselves of some great project and never call you back, and half hoping that she would."

Elaine Lorillard received a note about a week later from Terri Turner, George's girl Friday. "Evidently George had mentioned it to her, and Terri. a jazz enthusiast, had talked George into getting in touch with Louis and me. She said, 'Why don't we come down and talk to you about it, because I think it's a great idea!' Charlie Bourgeois, Terri Turner, George Wein, my husband, Louis, and I were present at that meeting. Meanwhile, Louis had talked to the people at the Newport Casino because we were going to do it whether we got George or whoever. I'm not trying to downgrade George, but it's about time that my husband, Terri, and I got credit for having been the forerunners of the Festival."

James A. Van Alen, president of the Newport Casino and himself a member of one of the socially prominent Newport families, was eventually convinced that the casino could function as a concert site without harm coming to the tennis facilities.

The casino's board of governors voted unanimously to allow its use for the Festival for the nominal sum of $350. Louis P. Lorillard's grandfather had been one of the casino's founders; Louis P. Lorillard was a director of a prominent Newport bank and a board member of the casino. The Newport Casino was having financial difficulties; it wasn't as heavily endowed then as it is today. Somehow, all these factors helped to smooth the way.

In late fall of 1953 George Wein was selected to organize the Festival. The Lorillards deposited twenty thousand dollars in an account to defray expenses for the talent to be booked. They helped find sponsors among some of the country's leading scholars and musicians, including Cleveland Amory, author of The Last Resorts; Marshall Stearns, associate professor of English at Hunter College in New York City; Father Norman O'Connor, chaplain of the Newman Club at Boston University, sometimes referred to as 'the jazz priest"; John Hammond ; and Leonard Bernstein, composer and conductor of the New York Philharmonic.

The Lorillards. leaving Wein in charge, then took off in April of 1954 for a vacation in Capri.

To Wein's everlasting credit, with the Festival barely three months away, he was able to line up talent and make arrangements for it. The man he could not have functioned without was Charlie Bourgeois. Charlie, once a bartender at the Boston Health Club, had presented a series of piano jazz concerts at John Hancock Hall. One musician described him to me as "the man who knew where everything was at and how to get it."

In the August 1955 Esquire article Wein described his problems in organizing the Festival: "My biggest aggravation was talent. Everybody apparently decided to ask way above what they usually got. They didn't seem to realize that the Festival was a nonprofit project and that if I made any money the surplus went to assist musicians and jazz in general. The prices I had to pay were absurd. I almost lost my mind because last year the bookers held us up. The bookers never thought it was an authentic thing, a nonprofit thing. They just thought it was a George Wein promotion to make a dollar. Stan Kenton asked for two thousand dollars for two nights just to narrate the thing, plus transportation from the coast. But I needed him because Duke couldn't make it."

Then there were the Newport residents. Invitations were sent to sixty-five Newport families to help sponsor the Festival. There were two acceptances, and only one came from a socialite member of the community: George Henry Warren. (The other acceptance came from Edward Capuano, a businessman from Providence and a comparative newcomer to Newport.)

So in 1954, with the arrival of the first Festival, the massive casino building on Bellevue Avenue, almost strangling in the luxurious vines that covered it, was about to be refurbished with some original American culture. But first there were the social preliminaries.

The Warrens invited a large gathering of the prominent to a garden party at their home in Newport. Henry Warren had long been a fan of pianist Teddy Wilson, so Wilson played for the occasion. "He even paid his salary for the evening," Elaine Lorillard said. "Lee Wiley was one of Charlie Bourgeois' favorites, and I'm sure that she appeared at his suggestion." In any event the choices seemed to be just right for the occasion.

During the evening Lee Wiley, blond and lovely in a pink gown, encircled by a crowd of well-wishers, sang music by the Gershwins, Cole Porter, and Rodgers and Hart. Teddy Wilson complemented her soft voice with a gentle touch, accenting in all the right places as her voice floated through the cool night air. The appreciative audience applauded loudly, with shouts of   Bravo!" It seemed a portent of things to come. The crowd mixed happily with the musicians, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves enormously. At the party, Mrs. Lorillard was heard remarking that "the old-line set will probably come around, but it's the members of the younger set that seem most cautious."

The charter was drawn up and filed with the secretary of state of Rhode Island on April 29, 1954. The fee was five dollars. It was called The Jazz Festival of Newport, R.I., Inc. The five names that appear on the document are those of Louis and Elaine Lorillard and three attorneys. The purpose of the corporation, according to the charter, was to promote an interest in music; hold music festivals, jazz bands festivals and other entertainments for the public; conduct musical competitions; raise funds for the establishment of scholarships for the assistance of talented persons interested in music; and generally conduct and promote various functions, without profit, for charitable purposes.

On April 1, 1958, the name was changed to the American Jazz Festival Inc., and under that name the corporation was forfeited [failure to pay a renewal tax] on August 1, 1962. Newport Jazz Festival was incorporated on April 1, 1964. It too was forfeited on August 30. 1968.

The first program book, published in 1954, outlined the Festival's purpose more specifically: "to encourage America's enjoyment of Jazz, and to sponsor the study of our country's only original art form."

John Hammond was introduced by George Wein at the 1975 festival as   the man who has done more for jazz than anyone else I might name." Hammond stated recently, "As far as I'm concerned, Elaine Lorillard should have the whole credit for the concept of the Newport Festival. I think it was the most important social concept of the fifties as far as jazz is concerned and I bless her for it. I only wish she were back on the board of the New York Festival, but I don't think she'd want to be on anything so commercial."

In the beginning there was a feeling of purpose, high hopes, and determination. Beneath those blue-and-white-striped tents was a lot of good feeling and camaraderie.”