Ben Ratliff, NYTimes 'Arts Beat' blogger, ponders the future of the Newport Jazz Festival today in a review of this weekend's concerts. Ratliff points out that neither Saturday or Sunday's concerts were sold out and asks what needs to change for New England's landmark jazz fest to stay alive and maintain its good reputation in the City by the Sea. The landmark 57 year-old music event has had its ups and downs.
Ratliff notes: "Since 2004 it [the music, the jazz] has been more serious" and points to the older New Englanders who refuse to move their fold-up chairs from in front of the main stage, the diehards, who are true fans of American jazz. While there are younger "loosey-goosey" concert-goers, who presumably, "just wanna' have fun."
The history of the Newport Jazz Festival born in 1954, includes the time when festival concert schedules "mixed it up" with pop music stars like Barbra Streisand and Dionne Warwick, and the reason why the Newport Jazz Festival became a landmark event for not only Newport, but in the world of music festivals, and in fact, what lured this writer to Newport in 1965.
At the last Newport concert in which Dionne Warwick performed in 1971 to a sold-out audience at the old Festival Field site, fans and listeners, perched in the trees, came down out of Miantonomi Park and trampled the 10 foot-high chain-link fence to get a better advantage to hear "What the World Needs Now is Love." (Listen to the lyrics, the words are timeless, for both songs in this video.) After that concert season, the Newport Jazz Festival moved to, where else? New York City for a while, then Saratoga Springs, NY and relocated a few years later back to its birthplace, Newport, RI at Fort Adams State Park, which seats 10,000.
Newporters remember the sold out concerts of Ray Charles, Muddy Waters, Dizzy Gillespie, Roberta Flack, and Dave Brubeck, along with Led Zeppelin and Blood Sweat & Tears; or when they sat in their cars in the old A & P parking lot, now Stop & Shop, to listen to Rosemary Clooney's sold out concert in the 1990's at the Casino.
But today, most Newporters were busy watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees, occasionally reminded by the melodious notes that float on the wind across the Island, that the Jazz Fest was happening. In the real world, the performers, jazz greats that they are, are known only to jazz fans, and are not universally known by casual music-lovers who compose a larger group of concert-goers.
Mr. Ratliff spied some young people at the concert who are segregated in tents, several cultures away from the diehards who refused to move their chairs from the main stage to hear other performers at other venues and asked:
"But who are the plugged-in ones?"
"Is there a way the festival could change so that they’d identify with it more, without sacrificing the people in the collapsible chairs?"
Mr. Ratliff, thank you for posing these questions. The sponsors and producers of the Newport Jazz Festival should reconsider past history for future festivals. Mix it up!
The Newport Jazz Festival continues through tomorrow at Fort Adams State Park in Newport RI.
Sharon Watterson @ Examiner.com
