Newport on disc

Hundreds of live albums have been recorded at the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals by nearly as many artists, from Cannonball Adderley to Muddy Waters.

"I don't have any favorites," says festival founder George Wein, "because for one thing I'm not making any money off them. I didn't make good deals in the early days, so we don't get royalties. We got flat fees -- which, of course, at the time helped the festival survive. A lot of the recordings have not been that great for various reasons, but the Ellington recording was monumental, for him and the festival."

That 1956 performance is captured on two available albums, the single-CD Duke Ellington and His Orchestra at Newport and the double-disc At Newport 1956 Complete, both on Columbia/Sony. At a time when Ellington was considering retirement, that incendiary Newport set revitalized his career. His band then included bassist James Woode and drummer Sam Woodyard, powerful rhythmatists, as well as Johnny Hodges on alto sax, trumpeter Clark Terry, and Paul Gonsalves, whose legendary 27-chorus tenor-sax solo on "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" was captured on tape. Also notable is Ellington's July 4, 1959, set at Newport, available as Duke Ellington Live! (EmArcy).

Folk Festival producer Bob Jones says, "My favorite recordings are from the blues workshops of 1959 to 1964 that were done by Vanguard." That CD, Blues at Newport, includes Mississippi John Hurt, Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry, the Reverend Gary Davis, Sleepy John Estes, Robert Pete Williams, Jesse Fuller, John Hammond, Dave Van Ronk, and John Lee Hooker -- plus a Newport debut that still raises the hairs on the back of Jones's neck.

"Everybody who knew what was going on had heard of Skip James," he explains, "but only from early recordings, from the 1930s. He arrived at the festival right after he'd been found, as a substitute, I think, for Son House, who was ill. Skip himself had just come out of the hospital the week before. Somebody put a guitar in his hands. He sat on a chair and played this weird diminished chord set-up. Then he sang out in the most incredible falsetto voice. It was more than anybody could have thought, better than we'd ever heard him on the recordings. People were just . . . I started weeping. We were stunned. It was like having Picasso come in your house and paint you a painting."

Vanguard also has several volumes of folk and country music performances from the festival, including Newport Broadside: Topical Songs at the Newport Folk Festival 1963, with Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, the Freedom Singers, and others, and Nashville at Newport, with Maybelle Carter, Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash, Ike and Don Everly, and more.

-- T.D.

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