Newport on film

Three must-see documentaries that are available on video provide a glimpse back to the great early days of the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals. The most captivating is Bert Stern & Aram Avakian's film Jazz on a Summer's Day (Galaxy Productions), shot in 1958, with often compelling performances by Louis Armstrong, Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, Chuck Berry, Big Maybelle, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Chico Hamilton, George Shearing, Jimmy Giuffre, Sonny Stitt, Jack Teagarden, and a host of other legendary musicians.

"It's a great movie. It did a lot for jazz," festival producer George Wein reflects. "I like 90 percent of it. What I don't like is that he hired people to go into the studio for the crowd shots. Every so often I see them and I wonder, `What does this have to do with the festival?' It makes me shudder. So I watch the first half of the movie."

Wein is less ambivalent about on the festival's own annual highlights documentaries of the past decade or so, which typically run on PBS each fall. "We have 10 or 12 hours of shows and some are quite good. The filming is good, the sound is good, and the music is good."

The Vestapol/Rounder-released tapes Devil Got My Woman and Delta Blues/Cajun Two-Step capture the African-American ethnicity that was an important part of the early days of the folk festival. The great Delta bluesmen Howlin' Wolf, Son House, Skip James, and Bukka White appear on the first video, in good form. The second video features Skip James, House, and White, the straight-from-Africa music of Ed and Lonnie Young's Mississippi fife-and-drum band, and the Creole music of accordion maestro Alphonse "Bois Sec" Ardoin and his fiddling colleague Canray Fontenot, fetched from rural Louisiana by Bob Jones at the instruction of festival board member and famed musicologist Alan Lomax.

-- T.D.

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