Crowd pleasers and other cats Newport Jazz’s annual health report BY JON GARELICK

The Newport Jazz Festival (or, as it’s been known officially for the past 21 years: JVC Jazz Festival — Newport, R.I.) is the music’s ultimate economic — and in some ways, artistic — test. Since the demise of the big bands and its end as a dance music and as pop, jazz has been an intimate, minority art form. This past weekend, August 13 and 14, George Wein and his Festival Productions booked more than two dozen separate acts on three stages at the 10,000-capacity Fort Adams State Park. That’s a lot of artists’ fees, and as Wein likes to say, "You can’t have a festival without people." Last year, for the festival’s 50th anniversary, Wein, for the first time in years, booked a "pure" jazz festival without any pop crowd pleasers. This year, he went for purity again, and by the end of the Sunday-night grand-finale all-star 80th-birthday tribute to drummer Roy Haynes, a spokesperson was calling the event a success: 7200 people on Saturday, 6100 on Sunday. Enough to put the festival in the black and, more important, please its title sponsor.

As an annual barometer of the music’s health, Newport is good for report-card keeping: who played and how well? But with its born-again æsthetic, it also offers the irresistible chance to ask the big questions: what can draw a crowd? What can hold a crowd? What can convert a crowd? How artistically successful can this nuanced instrumental music be when it has to project to the cheap seats and do it in that worst of all venues for musicians: the great outdoors?

This year’s curtain raiser was instructive. Eartha Kitt is a 78-year-old cabaret artist used to vamping it up in front of, at most, a few hundred people. Friday night at the Newport Casino of the International Tennis Hall of Fame, she played to a few thousand. This was musical theater more than it was jazz. But theatrics — Kitt’s crack comedy timing, and superb lighting that even benefitted from the Newport fog rolling across the stage in the steamy night — had the audience in the far grandstand alternately cracking up and swooning. Kitt knew how to deliver a lyric so those grandstanders could hear every word. Of course, Stephen Sondheim’s "I’m Still Here" was the prefect opener. But with lines like "I lived through Shirley Temple — and I’m here," and references to the WPA, you have to wonder. The crowd was old — but not that old, and people seemed nostalgic for a time before they were born. Kitt’s opener, the Artie Shaw Orchestra, got some applause of recognition when leader Dick Johnson announced tunes like "Frenesi" and "Stardust" and "Begin the Beguine," and then again after the opening bars of the melody. It was like 1945 all over again . . . I’d guess.

Big bands are a hard sell, for whatever reason. Audiences want solo stars, and, besides, big bands are old-fashioned. But the Dave Holland Big Band, the Sunday-morning opener, got some of the best spontaneous ovations of the weekend. Holland is a bred-in-the-bone modernist who traverses a lot of ground (early gigs included Miles Davis and Anthony Braxton), and he matches synchro-mesh section work and a taste for blues with funk beats and corkscrewing melodies. He knows how to layer those themes, which he did especially well in "Blues for CM." Like that piece’s namesake, Charles Mingus, Holland appreciates roiling counterpoint, so he’ll set soloists like tenor Chris Potter and trombonist Robin Eubanks against each other, or set the whole band loose as he did in "Last Minute Man." The writing carried the pieces from peak to peak, with backing choruses of horns goosing the soloists from one section to the next. It was challenging stuff, but Holland took the crowd with him.

At times, those outdoor acoustics seemed the biggest challenge. Sometimes it’s the notes you play; sometimes it’s how you play them. Steve Nelson of the Holland band takes a lot of the vibrato out of his vibraphone, and his hard, dry, crystalline tone cut through the breezes on that point jutting out into Newport Harbor. Patricia Barber, on the other hand, one of the brightest lights in jazz these days, was all but lost on the main stage Saturday. Kitt sang in four languages and made you understand all of them; Barber’s whispery tones were lost in her "Danson le Gigue," and even a familiar chestnut like "Norwegian Wood" disappeared in the damp heat. It didn’t help that her band trafficked in free tempos.

Or take Joe Lovano and Dave Liebman, two undisputed masters who were also victims of the big stage. Their Saxophone Summit outfit spun its wheels on the hyperventilating solos of the two stars. In his solo feature, the great drummer Billy Hart’s cymbal work turned into indistinct sibilants on the breeze. It didn’t help that a noisy prop plane dragging an ad for Payless Autoglass flew low over the point during the performance.

But compare that with the ever-buttoned-down (Wynton wore a tan suit, tie, and French cuffs in the 90-degree heat) efficiency of the Wynton Marsalis Quintet. Everything they played had presence. Was it the clearly defined swing and Latin rhythms? The hooky tunes? Or a better soundcheck? Drummer Ali Jackson began his solo popping his rims and hi-hat in clear, swinging syncopations. Wynton’s detractors knock his music for being risk-free, but as the saying goes, it sounded well.

There’s no applause meter at Newport, of course, so a measure of what worked on the main stage and what didn’t is still subjective. Joshua Redman’s Elastic Band played hard and funky, but his electronic saxophone effects are becoming just that: effects. He builds better solos in an acoustic setting, and did in the finale jamming with Haynes. But the crowd loved him either way. Likewise Medeski Martin & Wood: they were best when they were channeling Mingus ("Nostalgia in Times Square," with John Medeski on acoustic piano), but the audience responded to the familiarity of their heavy electric gear.

The Saturday closer, the Charles Lloyd Quartet, made the most of the leader’s loose forms, and his own Coltrane-isms packed more punch than Liebman’s or Lovano’s, probably because he didn’t overplay. Even working up a tenor-sax fury, he was relaxed. And a flute feature showed off not only his sense of form but his beautiful tone.

Is it any wonder that just about everything I caught on the smaller, more contained "Pavilion" and "Guitar" stages worked? Both were open tents, the Pavilion with about 400 folding chairs (about twice as many people as could fit into Scullers or the Regattabar), the Guitar stage with about half that. But both tents were usually overflowing with standees who could hear everything via the well-deployed PA speakers.

Carla Bley, almost as strict as Wynton, had her band in matching black suits. They performed her 15-minute-plus arrangement of "The Star Spangled Banner," mournful, celebratory, and comic. Her piano playing was simple, spare, personal, with different melodies "singing" in different registers. McCoy Tyner’s band (with Ravi Coltrane on saxophone and trumpeter Terell Stafford) and the Cannonball Adderley Legacy Band (led by drummer Louis Hayes with alto Vincent Herring and trumpeter Jeremy Pelt) brought hard-bop-style fire and tunefulness.

Some choices for the Pavilion were odd. Wouldn’t the trio of banjo player Béla Fleck (who had jam-band appeal) and bassist Stanley Clarke and violinist Jean-Luc Ponty (holdovers from the fusion era with good "straight" jazz credentials) be a surefire big-stage hit, especially with Ponty’s acoustic-proof electric violin slicing through the air?

No matter, I was happy to sit and watch Don Byron jam on oldies with pianist Jason Moran and drummer Hart (better served here) while the Haynes festivities were getting under way at the big stage. And when I caught Mark Whitfield swinging in perfect balance with bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Donald Edwards in the Guitar tent, I knew I was where I belonged.