Working the margins

George Wein's enduring gamble with jazz and folk

by Jon Garelick

George Wein

"In my mind, as far as what's happening now, I'm a complete anachronism," says legendary concert promoter and producer George Wein. And yet, much to his own surprise, Wein and his Festival Productions, which puts on the annual Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals (which take place this year August 3 through 5 and 10 through 12, respectively), are thriving.

In 1954, Wein organized the first Newport Jazz Festival with what now seems an impossibly rich line-up of jazz greats: Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Errol Garner, Lennie Tristano with Lee Konitz, and a tribute to Count Basie with a small ensemble of Basie-ites: Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Vic Dickenson, Jo Jones, Milt Hinton, and Teddy Wilson. Those were the "pure" days of the festival. By 1958, Chuck Berry was in the festival line-up, and the mix with pop has continued ever since, just as it has in the folk festival -- the former purview of acts like folk granddaddy Peter Seeger and blues titan Howlin' Wolf as well as then new folkies Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. The folk festival this year has bona fide folkies the Indigo Girls and country-folk goddess Nanci Griffith but also blues-rock belter Joan Osborne and alternative blues guys the North Mississippi Allstars with John Medeski as a special guest. This year's jazz festival includes ageless jazz star Dave Brubeck; a new superstar headliner with an undeniable jazz pedigree, Diana Krall; Ray Charles, who, to invoke Duke Ellington's well-worked phrase, is "beyond category"; and pop diva Natalie Cole.

What makes Wein and his company an anachronism is that they continue to fight the pop-music world even as they use it. "I hate the rock world," Wein tells me when we get together for lunch on Newbury Street. He's 75 now, and he walks with a cane, but he's more dapper than ever, in a checked jacket, white shirt, and dark tie. And as he recalls the ups and downs of his career, the great moments and the raw deals, he laughs easily and the years fall away from his face. His company now produces jazz festivals all over the world, Newport -- with its 10,000-person-per-day capacity -- being one of the smaller ones. There's also the JVC Jazz Festival every year in New York City, the Saratoga Festival, the Playboy Jazz Festival in Los Angeles, and the giant 10-day New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival every spring, which can draw as many as 90,000 people in a single afternoon for acts as diverse as the Dave Matthews Band and swamp-pop legend Frankie Ford. (See "The New Orleans Connection.")

"It was really [Columbia Records producer] John Hammond who brought in Chuck Berry to Newport," says Wein, who also ordered Bob Dylan to offer the crowd an acoustic encore after Dylan's infamous electric debut at Newport in 1965. "When Chuck Berry did his duckwalk across the stage at Newport, I thought it was terrible. I happen to love Chuck Berry, and I love the duckwalk -- I can't wait for him to do it! But we were so purist in those days -- I was purer than the purest critic. I'm given credit now for putting Chuck Berry on at the Newport Jazz Festival -- I was way ahead of my time because that's where the festivals have gone now -- and I fought it tooth and nail! I always say, `Please, give John Hammond credit, don't give me credit.' "

I propose that the festivals, both jazz and folk, thrive on turning points, when key crossover artists bring in a whole new audience, and that the pop stars (a Natalie Cole, or the Indigo Girls) can turn an audience on to newer or different acts (the North Mississippi Allstars, Uri Caine, Roy Hargrove, or even a jazz legend like Wayne Shorter who remains unknown to the larger audience). But Wein doesn't go for my thesis, at least as far as jazz is concerned. He's been through too much for that. "There's no given artists that could have done it. We've gone through crossover jazz groups -- the Spyro Gyras. Last year we had Femi Kuti." Instead, Wein has seen a gradual broadening of the audience ever since he returned to Newport -- after a decade layoff -- in 1981.

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan

Newport's hiatus is as storied as its inception. By 1969 -- the year of Woodstock -- rock had taken over, and Wein, desperate to keep his festival relevant and in the public eye, looked for rock acts. "See, I consider '69 the low point of my whole career. Because for the first time I lost faith -- and I'll use the word with quotation marks because it changes so much -- I lost faith in `jazz,' because I could see, hey, there was a whole thing out there with the underground press: Ginger Baker was a better drummer than Elvin Jones, Jack Bruce was a better bass player."

Wein asked around and was told that Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson learned flute by studying Rahsaan Roland Kirk, that Led Zeppelin were a good white blues group. "So I hired all these rock groups, and at that point I could hire them, they were all available to me, they all wanted to come to Newport. There was no Don Law [the long-time monolith of the New England live-music scene] at that time. I could have had the whole rock world. I could have built what Don Law has built. And after that year I said never again, I don't want to do that, it's not where I'm coming from. I had no control over the groups, no control over the people. They were bigger than the festival. Any one of the acts on the bill without the other acts could have drawn the same number of people. And we never sold tickets faster in our life. The only time we came close was when we had Frank Sinatra a few years earlier. Newport Jazz Festival tickets sales go like this [Wein shows me a stepwise incline with his left hand] and they reach a level at a certain point and they stop. You bring a pop artist and the day the tickets go on sale, they sell out."

Wein didn't learn his lesson that fast, though. In 1971 he hired a new band called the Allman Brothers. "After Woodstock, no one would allow rock festivals. Those kids had no place to go. I asked Ahmet Ertegun [at Atlantic Records] to recommend a white blues group, but I wanted to make sure they weren't popular. So in January he recommended this group he'd just signed. And between January and July they became monsters. So the kids descended on Newport and they broke the fences down and we cancelled the festival."

In his decade away, Wein developed what he called the Newport Jazz Festival/New York, and he refined his marketing strategy, most significantly in the area of sponsorships. He'd worked with the Schlitz brewery in Newport, but now he codified the idea of the "name sponsorship," which has become a standard in the industry. Kool cigarettes and then JVC took part (this year's Newport event is, officially, JVC Jazz Festival-Newport).

"When I came back," says Wein of his '81 return to Newport, "I knew everybody in the audience. It was all the jazz fans from the '60s and going back to the '50s. As a few years went on, those people were getting older, and our crowds were getting bigger with people I didn't know. There was a gradual change in the audience, so that now I see a few people my age or a little younger, but basically I don't know anybody in the audience." The '69-'71 audience was a Woodstock aberration, not a "lasting audience," as Wein puts it. For the past few years the festival has featured a second stage, around the corner from the main "Fort Stage" at Newport's Fort Adams State Park, featuring edgier artists -- last year John Zorn and James Carter's Electric Project, this year Caine and James Blood Ulmer and even jam band the Slip. "The second stage is very popular," says Wein. "So now you are getting the more curious younger people who really don't know that much about jazz but they don't want to be just rock kids. So that keeps us alive."

As the Indigos revitalized the Newport Folk Festival (see "Booking folk"), the jam-band scene, with crossover stars Medeski Martin & Wood, have helped bring new blood into the jazz fest. Certainly MM&W have given hope to jazz audiences -- this is a group with a strong contemporary feeling for rock and funk but also with a strong sense of jazz tradition and forward-thinking experimentation. "There is a jazz relationship to what they do," Wein agrees about MM&W. But, he argues, MM&W and their jam-band camp followers "don't want to hear Diana Krall on the same bill. The Diana Krall people will listen to MM&W. They won't like it, but it won't keep them away. If you did a jam-band festival, you'd have a uni-directional group of young people and it would feel like an old-time rock festival."

Wein's idea, of course, is to avoid overstocking the festival with a particular type of pop band, or with any one band who're "too popular" and could take over the festival. He also offers reasons why the hope of great crossover epiphanies among diverse audiences isn't easily achieved. "I once said that in soul music, the performers related to the daily lives of the people in the audience. There was a relationship -- the blues, losing their lover, the unfaithful husband, `Baby, baby, baby, wha'd you do to me?' " Rock wasn't in a relationship to the world, it was an escape from the world. It went to a world where the sound is so loud it shut out all the problems of school, all the problems of parental difficulties. And I think the jam-band thing is not unlike that."

And yet Wein keeps trying to find the right mix of pop and "pure" jazz expression, with more forays into world music. And there are those few stunning discoveries, like the Afro-Pop star Femi Kuti. "The crowd loved Femi Kuti last year. They just flipped! They didn't know who he was. But all of a sudden there was all this life from the stage. . . . To me, the musical content is negligible. But there's a spirit there that communicates. The three girls wiggle up there and the band keeps banging away and the people can boogie. We've got to have a little of that. The audience has to stand up a few times during the festival."

I mention artists whom I as a jazz fan would consider mainstream -- former Ornette Coleman bassist Charlie Haden, who's wonderful concert at Sanders Theatre a few years ago with a string ensemble was undersold, even though it featured his most accessible, popular repertoire. "Charlie Haden's one of the great musicians in the history of jazz," Wein responds. "As an attraction, he has literally no ticket-buying public. But you put him on a festival and package him correctly, he'll get incredible applause. By themselves they can't do it. That's my continual dilemma: how can I draw people, still keep the critics interested in what I'm doing, and still keep my sponsor happy? It's a total dilemma. The last one I try to make happy is myself. We've been doing festivals for so long. There's never any given formula to use, except that a festival without people is not a festival.

"People never ask me, why is it that I've lasted since 1954 when festivals come and festivals go and styles of music have come and gone and I'm still putting on festivals and my sponsors are staying with me? And I do it in the most difficult city in the world, in New York, in a rock-and-roll age. I don't know myself, I would like to find out what it is that has allowed me to last. A real analysis. I can think of a lot of things. One thing is, we work very hard." Wein talks about the integrity of the people he works with, the use of sponsorships. But he also emphasizes that concert presenters have to pay attention to the drift of young musicians -- whether it wanders toward avant-garde or funk. "There's an energy of young musicians out there that cannot be ignored. No matter what your tastes in music, you can't ignore that energy."

But, after all, he concludes, "I come from another world, my sets of standards, my concepts, are different. But I still survive in this rock world. And I don't know how! I really don't! It's very strange."

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The Newport Folk Festival takes place this Friday through Sunday, August 3, 4, and 5; the JVC Jazz Festival-Newport follows on August 10, 11, and 12. Saturday and Sunday events are held at Fort Adams State Park, Friday-night events at other locations in Newport. Call (401) 331-2211 or visit www.festivalproductions.net.

The New Orleans connection

George Wein and Festival Productions have two signature events: Newport and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. The latter is scheduled every year over the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May, and Wein has been involved in it since 1970. For fans, it's a chance to hear jazz greats like Wynton Marsalis and Max Roach and regional artists from the world of pop, blues, zydeco, and Cajun. But the festival has ballooned every year, with superstars like Phish, Dave Matthews, and Jimmy Buffett drawing huge crowds to New Orleans's Fair Grounds race track. All of which has brought Wein and New Orleans producer Quint Davis under fire for greedily crowding the site and subverting the integrity of the festival.

"I was very concerned with Phish," says Wein. "Not because of what they did on the stage. The kids they brought were followers that hung out, they didn't want to leave the field. Then when they got in the city, they had no place to stay, they just hung out on Bourbon Street. And all that whole week you could see nothing but Phish kids all around. That kind of a crowd will kill your festival. . . . Dave Matthews's crowd is not like that. They come, go see the concert, go home, go about what they're doing, follow their life. Jimmy Buffett, Paul Simon, groups like that we can handle. Groups like Phish, Rage Against the Machine, we can't handle it. And I made a statement -- the agents were ready to kill me -- here the biggest group in the country came to New Orleans, and when they were over I said, `We never want Phish back here.' Quint was ready to kill me! It made the Los Angeles papers. The agents called up: `Is Wein crazy? Is he insane?' I meant it."

-- JG

Booking folk

Bob Jones began working for the Newport Folk Festival as a volunteer in its second year, 1963, and has been with Wein and Festival Productions virtually ever since. Over the last decade, the biggest boon to the festival audience has been the movement in women's music, particularly artists like the Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco, and Sarah McLachlan. "I think we had Sarah here the year before she started Lilith Fair," says Jones. "I'm sure that if she was as smart as people think she is, she would have looked around and seen what was happening. At that point, a lot of the women moved off in that direction.

For Jones, the major challenge in booking the Newport Folk Festival is competing for talent, especially against the concert booking arm of multimedia behemoth Clear Channel (represented locally by Don Law). "We had a terrible time this year trying to find main headliners for the folk festival. In booking we were just hitting dead ends. Not that we didn't have the money to spend -- we were trying to spend money -- but many artists, even the second echelon of artists, wait for a tour to come along. So they play 27, 30 dates across the country.

"With the onslaught of SFX -- now Clear Channel -- it's become even more difficult. . . . We've felt certainly on the folk festival that we catch artists sometimes on the way up and sometimes we catch them on the way down. It's nothing to do with their artistry, it's only to do with the power of the financial structure that they have. The festival this year we feel is a fabulous festival musically -- the jazz festival is the same way, presenting people that you don't get to see very often. But still it's become much more difficult to book these kinds of artists -- and expensive."