Mark Braud (left) and Charlie Gabriel of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which played the Newport Folk Festival last weekend.
Mark Braud (left) and Charlie Gabriel of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which played the Newport Folk Festival last weekend.
Hey, so, um, I know we've mentioned this already, kind of a lot, but ... we're webcasting from the CareFusion Newport Jazz Festival this weekend!
Apropos of that, our Take Five listening series this week features five standout performances from the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival. It comes courtesy of the good people at Wolfgang's Vault; their tape restoration and archiving provides us with an incredible audio snapshot from jazz history. Today, we see Stan Getz and Max Roach and Sarah Vaughan as larger-than-life figures. Back then, it was less than a year from the release of the mainstream hit record Getz/Gilberto, and only a few years removed from the epochal Freedom Now suite, and not long from when Vaughan was making records with Quincy Jones. And the music was clamored after too — in 1960, only four years prior, there were riots generated by over 12,000 young people seeking access to the sold-out festival!
Perhaps you've seen the documentary Icons Among Us: Jazz In The Present Tense. It too got footage from the Newport Jazz Festival, and makes the case that at this very moment in time, there's an entire new jazz history waiting to be written about. Which raises the question: in 1964, did the people in attendance think they were witnessing something special? That nearly 50 years later, that moment would still be talked about, studied, nostalgically remembered? I'm pretty confident the music this year will be solid. As for its potential historicity? Let's hope that in 46 years we'll collectively be able to recall how smokin' Jason Moran was. [Take Five: Highlights From The 1964 Newport Jazz Festival]
Also, we submit to you that the Preservation Hall Jazz Band played the Newport Folk Festival last weekend with plenty of special guests from the not-jazz world. When Josh Jackson and I caught this group at Jazz Fest in New Orleans, it was good music. We recorded the set as part of NPR Music's Newport Folk coverage, for which final archive sets and photos are trickling in. If you're curious to see what we'll be up to this coming weekend, it's a good sneak peek. [Newport Folk Festival Live: Preservation Hall Jazz Band: Newport Folk 2010]
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