[Dixielandjazz] The Newport Jazz Festival

[Stephen G Barbone]

George Wein is THE MAN, as far as knowing how to produce a jazz  
festival is concerned. So what is he doing now that he's sold his  
company?
He's having fun this year, performing at the Newport Festival in his  
quintet with Anat Cohen, Howard Alden, Jimmy Cobb, and Esperanza  
Spalding.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.barbonestreet.com
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband
August 9, 2008 - NY TIMES - By Peter Keepnews
Newport After George Wein: One of the Stars Will Be George Wein

Jazz lovers and jazz musicians are converging on Newport, R.I., this  
weekend, as they have been doing since 1954, for what is universally  
recognized as the jazz festival that put jazz festivals on the map.  
And, as usual, George Wein, the man who produced the first Newport  
Jazz Festival and built on its success to create a worldwide music  
empire, is there.

But things are a little different this summer.

Last year Mr. Wein (pronounced WEAN) sold his company, Festival  
Productions. He continues to work for the new owner, Festival Network,  
and he has been actively involved this year in the JVC Jazz Festival  
Newport, as his baby has been known for two decades. But he is no  
longer the man who signs the checks. The words “George Wein presents,”  
once ubiquitous at Newport, will be nowhere to be seen this summer.

In fact, this weekend Mr. Wein’s most visible role will be one he has  
played since long before he became a concert promoter: jazz pianist.  
His quintet — called, like all the bands he has led for the last half- 
century, the Newport All-Stars — will be among the featured acts on  
Sunday afternoon.

“As a producer, you get pleasure from producing great festivals,” Mr.  
Wein said this week at his apartment on the East Side of Manhattan,  
“but they really have to be perfect. There are always problems — all  
the things you’d like to control but can’t control.”

In contrast, he said, “The joy of playing, when you have a rapport  
with the musicians you’re playing with,” is “as great a thing as I can  
feel in my life right now.”

There can be no clearer indication of how things have changed at  
Newport than the way Mr. Wein’s group ended up on the festival  
schedule. In the past he would have simply booked himself. This year  
he was invited to perform by Jason Olaine, Festival Network’s recently  
hired vice president for programming, whose responsibilities include  
serving as artistic director of the company’s flagship jazz festivals  
in Newport and New York.

“We had a slot open on Sunday on the main stage,” Mr. Olaine said,  
“and I said, ‘George, wouldn’t it be nice if we had you and the All- 
Stars play?’ He said, ‘I wouldn’t be opposed to it, but if you’re  
going to put me on, do it on one of the smaller stages.’ ” (The  
festival grounds, at Fort Adams State Park, contain one large  
performance area and two small ones.) But, both men say, Mr. Olaine  
insisted that Mr. Wein should be, for an hour at least, the center of  
attention.

“There is a transitional moment this year,” said Mr. Olaine, a former  
record and nightclub executive, “and I thought it would be nice to  
have George be part of it.” But he emphasized that Sunday’s  
performance “isn’t a swan song for George,” adding, “He’ll always be a  
part of the festival.”

That sentiment was echoed by Chris Shields, Festival Network’s co- 
chairman. Asked what the future held for Mr. Wein, who despite his  
stature and his track record is, after all, technically just another  
employee, Mr. Shields said emphatically, “George has job security,  
period.”

Mr. Shields characterized Mr. Wein as “kind of a chairman emeritus” —  
nearly echoing the words of Mr. Olaine, who called him “the professor  
emeritus” — but beyond that, Mr. Wein’s precise role is a little  
tricky to define. Tellingly, the Festival Network Web site  
(festivalnetwork.com) lists job titles for all the company’s  
executives except one: Mr. Wein, whose name, the fourth from the top,  
is listed simply as George Wein. “The reins have been handed to me,”  
Mr. Olaine said, “but George is the man behind the curtain.”

Mr. Wein, while praising Mr. Olaine, painted a slightly different  
picture. Speaking of his desire to “maintain control” of the Newport  
festival, he said: “If I don’t like something, it doesn’t happen. And  
if I want something, it goes on.”

Despite the potential for friction, Mr. Wein and Mr. Olaine worked  
together to assemble a Newport lineup that, like the one for the JVC  
New York festival in June, has been warmly received by jazz fans. It  
includes Aretha Franklin, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock and Wayne  
Shorter. It also includes what may be the most unusual crop of Newport  
All-Stars Mr. Wein has ever led.

In Mr. Wein’s earlier bands the musicians tended to be more or less  
his contemporaries, and the music tended to be comfortable small-group  
swing. This one, which he put together for a weeklong engagement in  
Bern, Switzerland, this spring, is more diverse and harder to  
categorize.

“We got a bad review in Switzerland,” Mr. Wein said with a wry smile.  
“The guy said, ‘It’s not bebop, it’s not swing, it’s not traditional,  
it’s nothing.’ It didn’t occur to him that maybe it was just great  
music!”

Mr. Wein spoke with particular pride of the group’s age range. He is  
82. The bassist Esperanza Spalding is 23. The ages of the other  
members — the drummer Jimmy Cobb, the guitarist Howard Alden and the  
saxophonist and clarinetist Anat Cohen — fall between those extremes.

Mr. Alden, who has been a Newport All-Star on and off since 1989, said  
he had detected a new energy in Mr. Wein’s playing over the last year  
or so and that selling Festival Productions might well be the reason  
for it.

“He seems much more relaxed and just enjoying himself and less self- 
conscious,” Mr. Alden said. Playing the piano might once have been “an  
excuse for him to get away from the business,” he suggested, but now  
Mr. Wein is playing like a man with “a burden lifted.”

He certainly sounded that way in his apartment, days before the first  
Newport jazz celebration of the new era. “I can’t tell you,” Mr. Wein  
said quietly, “how happy I am.”




Steve Barbone

www.barbonestreet.com
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband