[Dixielandjazz] Free Streaming Newport Jazz Festival Sounds

[Stephen G Barbone]

Here is some Jazz History, recorded live, available FREE. If a jazz  
buff, visit Wolfgang's Vault at the site listed in the below article.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


November 11, 2009 - NY TIMES - by Ben Ratliff
Historic Sounds of Newport, Newly Online



As the future of the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals continues to  
unfold, its recorded past has suddenly been thrown open.

Recently the festivals themselves almost disappeared, amid the  
financial collapse of their producing company, the Festival Network  
LLC. They returned last summer in a new guise, at their usual site,  
once George Wein, the founder of both festivals, regained the right to  
hold music events there.

It’s a complicated story. But if you want to know why the Newport Jazz  
Festival has been so important to American music, it’s easy: you just  
have to hear the recorded evidence. Bits and pieces have emerged over  
the years, in live recordings by Ellington, Coltrane and others. Now  
Wolfgang’s Vault, the online concert-recording archive, intends to  
fill in the gaps.

The company, based in San Francisco, bought the archives of the  
Newport festivals from the Festival Network last year. Bill Sagan,  
founder and chief executive of Wolfgang’s Vault, says the archives  
include many, many tapes: 1,000 to 1,200 individual performances,  
dating at least to 1955, the festival’s second year, and continuing to  
the end of the century. It is not a complete audio record — certain  
years contain only a small number of performances, or are missing  
completely — but it is a major one nonetheless.

Since the purchase, Wolfgang’s Vault has spent almost $5 million, Mr.  
Sagan said, on making audio transfers and mixes of the tapes. (Neither  
Mr. Sagan nor Chris Shields of the Festival Network would reveal the  
amount spent on acquiring the archive itself.) On Wednesday the  
company will begin posting free streams of a handful of performances  
from the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival, at wolfgangsvault.com: the first  
offerings include Count Basie, Dakota Staton and Art Blakey’s Jazz  
Messengers. By next Tuesday, when more are added, there will be 27  
sets from that year’s jazz festival, including some by Ahmad Jamal,  
Joe Williams, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver. The plan is to have  
hundreds more online in the coming months, from other years of Newport  
Jazz and from the Newport Folk Festival as well.

For jazz fans, this is serious business. There are chillingly good  
performances in the 1959 crop, from half-inch three-track tapes mixed  
for stereo, made with stage microphones that pick up the nuances of  
the drums and the growls of the band members. They’re strong enough in  
some cases to deepen our understanding of canonical artists, like  
Basie, or restore the reputation of nearly forgotten ones, like  
Staton. (The concerts can also be downloaded for $10 to $13 in higher- 
quality audio.)

Projects of this kind have in the past been plagued by questions  
involving copyright. When Mr. Sagan bought the archive of Bill Graham  
Presents six years ago, there was a lawsuit from performers and record  
labels, but it was eventually dismissed.

Mr. Sagan said he had done due diligence regarding copyrights with the  
Newport material and is paying the performers or their estates a  
generous royalty rate.

But there is uncertainty over who made the recordings. Mr. Sagan’s  
contract with the Festival Network says that Mr. Wein made the tapes  
and originally owned both the tapes and rights to them. Mr. Wein, for  
his part, says he never made recordings until much later.

“I never made tapes back then,” he said in a telephone interview. “I  
was never an archive person, either. I just didn’t pay any attention  
to it.” Speaking of the rights, he added, “If the tapes are from the  
’50s, chances are they were owned by record companies.”

Fifty years ago, according to the jazz historian Phil Schaap, only  
record companies were generally willing to lug high-quality gear to a  
concert site. (It’s fair to assume, also, that the 1959 tapes were not  
made by the Voice of America, which did record a great deal of the  
festival, but made its tapes in mono.) Mr. Sagan said his agreement  
with the Festival Network is specific on the subject of the  
recordings. “In the agreement,” he said, “Festival Network represents  
that they or a predecessor company recorded these recordings. They  
secondarily represented that they owned these recordings, and they  
thirdly represented that they owned the intellectual property and  
copyrights to these recordings. And when they made those  
representations, George Wein was an employee of the company.” Mr.  
Shields, chief executive of the Festival Network, was unavailable for  
comment on Tuesday. Meanwhile, we have great and vivid jazz: Staton’s  
blue wails; the gruff, excited shouts of the Basie band’s brass  
section during an aggressive solo by the trombonist Al Grey; the  
masterful attack-and-release of the Ahmad Jamal trio on “Poinciana.”

Enjoy it while you can.