Jazz Supermarket

"Next year," said Saxophonist Paul Desmond, "maybe they could arrange to have Eisenhower at the same time." Just about everybody else, it seemed, was on hand last week for the opening of the fifth and biggest Newport (R.I.) Jazz Festival. The Duke was back for a Tribute-to-Ellington night; Benny Goodman was there for nostalgia. Trumpeter Miles Davis had declined this year's invitation: "What, me dig that crazy scene? Never!" But he too was there last week--along with Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck, Lee Konitz, Sonny Rollins and a clutch of others--because the "crazy scene" was just too big to be ignored.

New Works. Special feature of this year's festival was the 17-man International Youth Band, recruited and trained by High School Music Director Marshall Brown, whose Farmingdale (N.Y.) High School Band was a Newport hit last year (TIME, July 15, 1957). Assigned to look for one young musician to represent each European country, Brown took a year's leave from his teaching job, toured Europe listening to nearly 700 musicians.

He had trouble digging up talented drummers, found that most of his sidemen (average age: 23) had a classically oriented training: "They kept giving me the blue-serge treatment. I had to work hard to get that rough-tweed effect." Language was a problem too; Brown's instructions to a sax man, for instance, were delivered to a trombonist, who translated them to a trumpeter, who again translated them for the confused saxophonist. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Brown's band was to play mostly new works, especially commissioned for the festival, e.g., John La Porta's Jazz Concerto for Alto Sax,

Jimmy Giuffre's The Pentatonic Man. In last week's concert, the band started stiffly, and the rhythm section never got completely untracked; but by the time they closed the set, the European cats were playing with the cohesive drive of a bunch of much-practiced pros.

Full Sphere. Last year's festival, the most successful ever, netted $50,000 (including $5,000 to establish a free clinic for narcotics-addicted jazzmen). The 1958 festival is almost certain to clear even more than that. But as Newport's popularity with the public soars, its reputation among jazzmen is declining. They regard it as a giant public relations carnival--"a jazz supermarket," Trumpeter Davis calls it. Saxophonist Desmond feels that Newport is all right "for the young fellows just getting started," but that established stars "have nothing specially to gain, and the critics present can give us a roasting."

That kind of talk is profoundly disturbing to Elaine Lorillard, socialite wife of Festival Founder Louis L. Lorillard. Says she: "We've been chided for putting on a show, as if it were degrading for jazz to be played in theatrical surroundings for money . . . But we see no point in jazz being private and ingrown. Jazz is a full sphere, not an empty circle."

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