His playing with the Yardbirds and as leader of his own bands brought a sense of adventure to their groundbreaking recordings.
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Pharoah Sanders Obituary
The New York Times pays tribute the the immensely gifted and spiritual sax player.
Girls Are Outnumbered in Jazz. At This Summer Camp, They Run the Show.
Jazz Camp for Girls, a four-day program in Denmark, has expanded to Finland, Poland and Sweden this year, giving young musicians a space to play music and build friendships.
For the full article, please click on the image, above.
George Wein, Newport Jazz Festival Trailblazer, Is Dead at 95
He brought jazz (and later folk music) to Rhode Island, and made festivals as important as nightclubs and concert halls on jazz musicians’ itineraries.
George Wein, the impresario who almost single-handedly turned the jazz festival into a worldwide phenomenon, died on Monday at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 95.
His death was announced by a spokeswoman, Carolyn McClair.
Jazz festivals were not an entirely new idea when Mr. Wein (pronounced ween) was approached about presenting a weekend of jazz in the open air in Newport, R.I., in 1954. There had been sporadic attempts at such events, notably in both Paris and Nice in 1948. But there had been nothing as ambitious as the festival Mr. Wein staged that July on the grounds of the Newport Casino, an athletic complex near the historic mansions of Bellevue Avenue.
With a lineup including Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald and other stars, the inaugural Newport Jazz Festival drew thousands of paying customers over two days and attracted the attention of the news media. It barely broke even; Mr. Wein later recalled that it made a profit of $142.50, and that it ended up in the black only because he waived his $5,000 producer’s fee.
But it was successful enough to merit a return engagement, and before long the Newport festival had established itself as a jazz institution — and as a template for how to present music in the open air on a grand scale.
By the middle 1960s, festivals had become as important as nightclubs and concert halls on the itinerary of virtually every major jazz performer, and Mr. Wein had come to dominate the festival landscape.
He did not have the field to himself: Major events like the Monterey Jazz Festival in California, which began in 1958, and the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, which began in 1967, were the work of other promoters. But for half a century, if there was a significant jazz festival anywhere in the world, there was a better than even chance it was a George Wein production.
At the height of his success, Mr. Wein was producing events in Warsaw, Paris, Seoul and elsewhere overseas, as well as all over the United States.
Where Jazz History Was Made
Newport remained his flagship, and it quickly became known as a place where jazz history was made. Miles Davis was signed to Columbia Records on the strength of his inspired playing at the 1955 festival. Duke Ellington’s career, which had been in decline, was reinvigorated a year later when his rousing performance at Newport landed him on the cover of Time magazine. The 1958 festival was captured on film by the photographer Bert Stern in the documentary “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” one of the most celebrated jazz movies ever made.
Mr. Wein’s empire extended beyond jazz. It included the Newport Folk Festival, which played a vital role in the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many other performers. (It was at Newport that Mr. Dylan sent shock waves through the folk world by performing with an electric band in 1965.) He also produced the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which showcased a broad range of vernacular music as well as the culture and cuisine of New Orleans, and staged festivals devoted to blues, soul, country and even comedy.
His one venture into the world of rock was not a happy experience. Gate-crashers disrupted the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival, whose bill for the first time included rock bands, among them Led Zeppelin and Sly and the Family Stone. The Newport city fathers issued a ban on such acts the next summer; when both rock (the Allman Brothers) and the gate-crashers returned in 1971, Mr. Wein was not invited back. (The Newport Folk Festival, which had not been held in 1970 but was scheduled for later in the summer of 1971, was canceled.)
He was not discouraged. In 1972 he moved the Newport Jazz Festival to New York City, where it became a less bucolic but more grandiose affair, with concerts at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Radio City Music Hall and other locations around town. Under various names and corporate sponsors, the New York event continued to thrive for almost 40 years. In addition, the jazz festival returned to Newport in 1981 and the folk festival in 1985, both once again under Mr. Wein’s auspices.
Mr. Wein’s success in presenting jazz and folk at Newport helped pave the way for the phenomenon of Woodstock and the profusion of rock festivals in the late 1960s and early ’70s. But jazz was always his first love.
Playing and Promoting
He was a jazz musician before he was a jazz entrepreneur. He began playing piano professionally as a teenager and continued into his 80s, leading small groups, usually billed as the Newport All-Stars, at his festivals and elsewhere. (He performed in public for the first time in several years at Newport in 2019. It was, he announced, “my last performance as a jazz musician.”)
He was a good player, in the relaxed, melodic vein of the great swing pianist Teddy Wilson, with whom he briefly studied. But he determined early on that playing jazz would be a precarious way for him to make a living, and he became more focused on presenting it.
The success of Mr. Wein’s Boston nightclub, Storyville, named after the red-light district of New Orleans where legend has it jazz was born, led Elaine Lorillard, a wealthy Newport resident, to approach him about producing what became the first Newport Jazz Festival, which she and her husband, Louis, financed. And the success of that festival determined the direction his career would take.
George Theodore Wein was born on Oct. 3, 1925, in Lynn, Mass., near Boston, and grew up in the nearby town of Newton. His father, Barnet, was a doctor. His mother, Ruth, was an amateur pianist. Both his parents, he recalled, loved show business and encouraged his interest in music, although they did not necessarily see it as a career option.
Mr. Wein took his first piano lessons at age 8 and discovered jazz while in high school. By the time he entered Northeastern University in Boston, he was beginning to think seriously about a career in jazz.
He served in the Army from 1944 to 1946, spending some time overseas but not seeing combat, and enrolled in Boston University after being discharged. Before graduating with a degree in history in 1950, he was working steadily as a jazz pianist around Boston.
In his autobiography, “Myself Among Others: A Life in Music” (2003), written with Nate Chinen, he said that he knew by then that “music was a crucial part of my being,” but that he also knew that he “had neither the confidence nor the desire to devote my life to being a professional jazz musician.” By the fall of 1950 he was a full-time nightclub owner; by the summer of 1954 he was a festival promoter.
Rough Patches
Mr. Wein encountered some rough times in the early years of the Newport Jazz Festival. In 1960 the bassist Charles Mingus and the drummer Max Roach, protesting what they called Mr. Wein’s overly commercial booking policy, staged a smaller “rebel” festival in another part of Newport in direct competition. But both events were overshadowed when throngs of drunken youths, unable to get tickets to Mr. Wein’s festival, descended on the city, throwing rocks and breaking store windows. City officials shut the Newport Jazz Festival down, although the Mingus-Roach event was allowed to continue.
As a result of the rioting, Mr. Wein’s permit was revoked, and he did not return to Newport in 1961. A festival billed as Music at Newport, staged by another promoter and featuring a range of music including some jazz, was presented in its place but was not successful. Mr. Wein was allowed back the next year, and the festival continued without incident until the end of the decade.
Coverage of Mr. Wein in the jazz press grew more negative over time, and the criticism would persist for the rest of his career. In 1959, the critic Nat Hentoff called the Newport Jazz Festival a “sideshow” that had “nothing to do with the future of jazz.” (Mr. Hentoff later changed his tune: In 2001 he wrote that Mr. Wein had “expanded the audience for jazz more than any other promoter in the music’s history.”)
Mr. Wein was sometimes attacked as exploitive, money-hungry, unimaginative in his programming and too willing to present non-jazz artists at his jazz festivals — criticism first heard when he booked Chuck Berry at Newport in 1958, and heard again when he booked the likes of Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and even the folk group the Kingston Trio (who performed at both the folk and jazz festivals in 1959). He professed to take the criticism in stride, but in his autobiography he left no doubt that he had forgotten none of it, quoting many of his worst notices and patiently explaining why they were wrong.
The two Newport festivals had been established as nonprofit ventures, but in 1960 Mr. Wein formed a corporation, Festival Productions, to run what soon became a worldwide empire. At the company’s height it was producing festivals and tours in some 50 cities worldwide. Over the years he also tried his hand at personal management and record production.
After years of, by his account, struggling to break even, Mr. Wein became a pioneer in corporate sponsorship in the late 1960s and ’70s, enlisting beer, tobacco and audio equipment companies to underwrite his festivals and tours. There was the Schlitz Salute to Jazz, the Kool Jazz Festival and, most enduringly, a partnership with the Japanese electronics giant JVC, which began in 1984 and lasted until 2008.
“I never realized that you could make money until sponsors came along,” he told The New York Times in 2004. “The credibility we’d been working on all those years always brought media notice. And then the opportunity for media notice was picked up by sponsors.”
In 1959, Mr. Wein married Joyce Alexander, who worked alongside him as a vice president of Festival Productions for four decades. She died in 2005. He is survived. by his partner, Glory Van Scott.
Presidential Honors
Over the years Mr. Wein received numerous honors and accolades. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2005 and inducted into the French Legion of Honor in 1991. He was honored by two presidents, Jimmy Carter in 1978 and Bill Clinton in 1993, at all-star White House jazz concerts celebrating the anniversary of the first Newport Jazz Festival. In 2015, the Recording Academy gave him a Trustees Award for lifetime achievement.
In 2007, nine years after a deal to sell 80 percent of Festival Productions to Black Entertainment Television fell through, the company was acquired by a newly formed company, the Festival Network. Mr. Wein remained involved, but as an employee — a kind of producer emeritus — and not the boss.
Things changed again in 2009, when the Festival Network ran into financial problems and Mr. Wein regained control of the handful of festivals left in what had once been a vast empire. (At first he was legally prevented from using the names Newport Jazz Festival and Newport Folk Festival because they belonged to the Festival Network, but he reacquired the rights in 2010.)
He also found new sponsors for the Newport Jazz Festival — first a medical equipment company and later an asset management firm, Natixis — to replace his longtime corporate partner, JVC. The folk festival, whose sponsors in recent years had included Ben & Jerry’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, had by then been without sponsorship for several years; both festivals were later partly sponsored by the jewelry company Alex and Ani.
In 2011 Mr. Wein announced that both Newport festivals, the only events he was still producing, would become part of a new nonprofit organization, the Newport Festivals Foundation.
He eventually handed over the reins of both festivals, although he remained involved until the end. Jay Sweet became producer of the folk festival in 2009 and six years later was named executive producer of the Newport Festivals Foundation. In 2016 Danny Melnick was promoted from associate producer to producer of the jazz festival, and the jazz bassist and bandleader Christian McBride, who had performed at Newport numerous times since 1991, was named artistic director. (Mr. Melnick left the company in 2017.)
The coronavirus pandemic caused the cancellation of both festivals in 2020, but they were back the next year. Mr. Wein had planned to attend the 2021 jazz festival, but on July 28, just two days before it was scheduled to begin, he announced on social media that he would not be there. (He did participate remotely, introducing the singers Mavis Staples, by phone, and Andra Day, via FaceTime.)
“At my age of 95, making the trip will be too difficult for me,” he wrote. “I am heartbroken to miss seeing all my friends.” But, he added, with a new team in place to run both festivals, “I can see that my legacy is in good hands.”
Correction: Sept. 16, 2021
An earlier version of this obituary omitted the name of a survivor. Mr. Wein is survived by his partner, Glory Van Scott. The earlier version also referred incompletely to the leadership of the Newport Jazz Festival. Although Danny Melnick was named producer of the festival in 2016, he left the next year.
Jazz Has Always Been Protest Music. Can It Meet This Moment?
The New York Times’ Giovanni Russonello writes, “Over the past 50 years, the music has become entrenched in academic institutions. As a result, it’s often inaccessible to, and disconnected from, many of the very people who created it: young Black Americans.”
If the Black Lives Matter movement has an anthem, it’s probably Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright.” Five years after its release, it’s still chanted en masse by demonstrators and blasted from car stereos at protests, fluttering in the air like a liberation flag.
Like many revolutionary anthems past, this one is the work of young jazz-trained musicians. Terrace Martin’s shivering alto saxophone and Thundercat’s gauzy vocals are as powerful as the track’s spitfire refrain: “Can you hear me, can you feel me?/We gon’ be all right.”
Mr. Martin, Thundercat and the famed saxophonist Kamasi Washington came up together in Los Angeles’s Leimert Park scene, where Black music, poetry, theater and dance have blended for decades. Romantically, it’s the kind of place you’d imagine as the backbone of the jazz world, like Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy of the 1980s or Dizzy Gillespie’s Harlem in the ’40s. But today, local scenes like this one are barely surviving. It’s the Ivory Tower, not the city, that has become the tradition’s main thoroughfare.
The music known as jazz grew up in New Orleans, in the decades after Emancipation, as Black and Creole people founded social clubs with their own marching bands. As it evolved, jazz remained a resistance music precisely because it was the sound of Black Americans building something together, in the face of repression. But at the end of the 1960s, just as calls for Black Power were motivating musicians to create their own publishing houses, venues and record labels, a new force emerged: Schools and universities across the country began welcoming jazz as America’s so-called “classical music,” canonizing its older styles and effectively freezing it in place.
This year, the pandemic and the protest movement against racial injustice have created a moment of enormous potential. Conversations about radical change and new beginnings have crept into seemingly every aspect of American life. But as jazz musicians reckon with the events of 2020, they have found themselves torn between the music’s roots in Black organizing and its present-day life in the academy.
The very institutional acceptance that many musicians sought in the mid-to-late-20th century has hitched jazz to a broken and still-segregated education system. Partly as a result, the music has become inaccessible to, and disconnected from, many of the very people who created it: young Black Americans, poorer people and others at the societal margins.
Of the more than 500 students who graduate from American universities with jazz degrees each year, less than 10 percent are Black, according to Department of Education statistics compiled by DataUSA. In 2017, the last year with data available, precisely 1 percent of jazz-degree grads were Black women.
“The education is the anchor,” the saxophonist J.D. Allen, 47, said in a recent interview. “We should be questioning our education system. Is it working? Is there a pipeline into the university for indigenous Black Americans to play their music, and learn their music? I don’t think that exists.”
Over the past five or 10 years, a number of musicians have helped pull jazz back into the cultural conversation, usually with message-driven music. It’s no coincidence that, like Mr. Lamar’s colleagues in Leimert Park, virtually all of them come from strong city scenes and learned much of what they know outside of school.
That’s noticeable in the calypso futurism of the London saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, and in the surrealist suites of the Chicago-based flutist Nicole Mitchell and her Black Earth Ensemble. The markings of outsiderism are all over Georgia Anne Muldrow’s new album with her Jyoti project, “Mama You Can Bet,” full of dusty, sample-based jazz collages, recorded alone in her Los Angeles studio.
Raised by musicians in Leimert Park, Ms. Muldrow remembers feeling immediately affronted when she enrolled in the New School’s jazz program. “I was like, ‘What are you trying to teach people?’ I was the worst student of all time,” Ms. Muldrow said in an interview, laughing as she remembered that she hadn’t lasted a full year. “At the center of the teaching would always be the idea that jazz is not about race. And it absolutely is. It was absolutely about where people weren’t allowed to go, which made them travel in their music.”
Inspired in part by the Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) theater artists who this summer published a 29-page list of demands for their industry, and by the female and nonbinary musicians who formed the We Have Voice collective, Mr. Allen and a number of other musicians recently began holding Zoom meetings. The group, which includes artists on three continents, has titled itself the We Insist! Collective in a reference to the rebel music of Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln and Oscar Brown Jr.; late last month it released a manifesto and charter listing 10 demands for the schools and other institutions that compose jazz’s mainstream economy.
Educational institutions must commit to revamping their curriculums around an anti-racist understanding, the collective wrote. A Black Public Arts Fund must be created to help increase the representation of African-American students in jazz programs. And educational institutions should work in partnership with “grass-roots local community organizations,” recognizing where the music has historically grown.
“The story of jazz is that of the pursuit of Black liberation, and that liberation can only happen through the dismantling of racism and patriarchy,” the manifesto reads.
Black musicians have built institutions since before the word “jazz” was even used. In 1910, James Reese Europe organized the Clef Club, effectively a union and booking agency for Black musicians in New York with its own large ensemble. But as white audiences fell in love with the music too, white entrepreneurs stepped in to handle the record labels, the publishing companies and the best-paying clubs.
The civil rights movement progressed and white liberal audiences recognized jazz musicians to be some of the country’s great artistic leaders, but they rarely treated those musicians as the scholars and thought-leaders that they were. White journalists, historians and broadcasters reserved that job for themselves.
At the midway point of the 1960s, after releasing his masterpiece, “A Love Supreme,” John Coltrane started a large ensemble with deeply spiritual intentions; he was abdicating the throne as jazz’s mainstream hero, and moving beyond many critics’ comprehension. That same year, a collective of musicians in Chicago formed the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, supporting each other in creating new music and educating young people on the South Side. Months earlier, in a series of concerts known as the October Revolution in Jazz, musicians in New York had seized the gears of concert presentation, breaking with the clubs.
“I think the music is rising, in my estimation. It’s rising into something else. And so we’ll have to find this kind of place to be played in,” Coltrane said at the time, calling for musicians to lead the way through “self-help.”
Somehow, it was in this moment that jazz programs began to spring up in academia, declaring the music’s history basically complete and assembling rigid curriculums based on bebop theory.
When the saxophonist and former Coltrane collaborator Archie Shepp was offered a job at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1969, he hoped to teach the music as he was playing it: in conversation with African diasporic culture, in collaboration with theater artists and dancers, in spaces designed around the ethics of the music itself.
“I quickly learned that that was not too feasible, and mine was a point of view that was not welcomed,” Mr. Shepp, 83, said in an interview. He proposed setting up a program in African-American music within the music department, but was shut down; he landed in African-American studies instead. “The idea of Black music input or some nonwhite element being integrated into the academic experience was immediately rejected,” he said.
Mr. Shepp was one of the various cutting-edge musicians who were invited to teach at the university level around this time, but never fully embraced by music departments. “They were not willing to tolerate an Archie Shepp or a Max Roach, a Sun Ra or a Cecil Taylor,” the historian Robin D.G. Kelley said in an interview. “They kicked them out and said, let’s open the doors to ‘professionals’” — primarily white instructors who weren’t top-tier public performers.
Combined with the resegregation of public education and the defunding of arts programs in many cities, the effects of academicization have been profound, and ironic. Jazz got a crucial nudge into the academy from Wynton Marsalis and his fellow young neo-traditionalists, who were guarding against what they saw as the corruptions of fusion and free jazz. But even the music made by the ace students in academic programs nowadays rarely upholds the qualities Mr. Marsalis meant to protect: the swing rhythm at the music’s core; a clear commitment to the blues; focus on lyricism.
When the esteemed drummer Billy Hart, now 79, took his first university teaching job in the 1990s, he got the sense that the academy was finally ready to hire real practitioners. “It became some kind of fad,” he said dryly in an interview. “They decided that the students would be better suited if they had somebody that had experience.”
Naledi Masilo, a jazz undergrad at the New England Conservatory and the president of its Black Student Union, said that with the events of this summer, she and other Black students felt called to speak up.
“Until the recent uprising and Black consciousness on all of these school campuses, there weren’t many conversations had on campus on a deep level about what role Blackness plays in this music,” Ms. Masilo said. “It was especially shocking to me in this jazz program, where there’s only three Black students and three Black faculty. There was a disconnect — how are you teaching this music without giving any real influence to the people and the culture?” (After publication, the chair of the school’s Jazz Studies department said there are currently five students and six faculty members who identify as Black.)
The students made three immediate demands, calling for action within the month. A group of N.E.C. alumni followed with a forceful letter of its own, co-signing the students’ ultimatums and adding more — including that the jazz department be renamed the department of Black American music.
Jason Moran, the MacArthur-winning pianist and multidisciplinary artist, is a professor at N.E.C., where he advises the Black Student Union. He tells his students to bear in mind that they should always be in tension with the institutions they seek to change. “An underground movement has to be underground,” he said in an interview.
In his own classroom, he rejects the notion of having a written curriculum. “What I talk about in my classes between my students and I, the kinds of conversations we have to break down about repertoire — who wrote what and why — is not on a syllabus,” he said. “You would never detect it if you searched it, because I don’t teach that way.”
Some schools are starting to approach the integration of humanities, history and artistic instruction that Mr. Shepp and others had in mind 50 years ago. One is Harvard University’s Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry doctoral program, recently founded by the pianist Vijay Iyer and driven by a mostly female faculty from a variety of global traditions. Another is the Berklee Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice, founded by the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, who conceived of the program with activists including Angela Davis.
Ms. Mitchell, the Chicago-based flutist, took over the jazz studies program at the University of Pittsburgh last year, stepping in after the death of its prior director, Geri Allen. Founded by the saxophonist Nathan Davis in 1970 as a concession to Black student activists, Pitt’s jazz program was attractive to Ms. Mitchell because of its focus on scholarship and musicology, as well as learning the notes.
Upon arriving, she proposed that the jazz program partner with the school’s Center for African-American Poetry to open a small venue in the community engagement center that Pitt was building in a historically Black neighborhood. The administration immediately said yes.
“This will be place for local musicians to perform, for students to connect with local musicians,” Ms. Mitchell said.
“The music is about community,” she added. “So if a student graduates and doesn’t have any connection to community, that’s a real rip-off for that student in terms of what they’re supposed to be gaining. And it’s also a rip-off for the future of the music.”