It's a gloomy day at Newport It's a gloomy, gloomy day. The music's going away.
When Jazz Impresario George Wein heard these lines, hastily composed by Poet Langston Hughes last week, he "bawled like a baby." Most of the backers of the Newport Jazz Festival bawled with him. When the biggest jazz bash in the country was closed down in the wake of drunken rioting, with 12,000 college students finally tamed by the state police, National Guard and the U.S. Marines, the backers figured to lose $150,000 in advance ticket sales, not to mention the festival's glamorous name.
By week's end Wein & Co. were singing a sprightlier tune. Performing jazzmen and local merchants were not pressing for their bills, ticket holders might be refunded with jazz albums instead of cash, and so it looked as if the festival would just about break even. While power shovels scooped heaps of beer cans off the streets, talk about permanent cancellation ("This means the end of the Newport Jazz Festival," Founder Louis L. Lorillard had said in the dark weekend hours) had all but disappeared.
The brightest note at Newport was sounded by a rebel group of modern jazzmen who launched their own competing festival in a rambling seaside hotel, Cliff Walk Manor. Headed by Bass Player Charlie Mingus and Drummer Max Roach, the rebels played right through the riotous weekend, drew 750 people on Sunday night, grossed $4,700. With the encouragement of Louis Lorillard's divorced wife Elaine, they made plans to form their own Jazz Artists' Guild, and to sell tapes of their concerts, which eventually may appear on four LPs under the title Rebellion at Newport. The cool rebels, including such top modern jazzmen as Roy Eldridge, Jo Jones, Ornette Coleman and Coleman Hawkins, hope to appear at Manhattan's Village Gate, tour the country next winter, return in triumph to Newport next year.
Even without the riots, the rebels feel, the old-style Newport Festival was doomed—it was too big, too square and too interested in box office instead of music. Even if the festival is revived next year, it will hardly be the same again. Langston Hughes summed it up:
I got to keep up singing
Though I got the Newport blues . . .
Those sad, bad Goodbye Newport blues.