There’s no one person responsible for creating music festivals — or for making them such a huge part of how we witness live performances today. But starting in 1954, one person developed a recipe for their secret sauce.
George Wein still goes to his signature event every year, checking out performances and greeting the artists. These days, he does it on a golf cart which drives him between stages — he’s about to turn 90, after all — but he says he takes his job as producer very seriously.”If I don’t hear the music, I don’t know what my festival is all about,” Wein says. “So I have to hear the music.
“Wein was already running a jazz club in Boston — and playing some piano himself — when he met a wealthy tobacco heiress named Elaine Lorillard. She spent her summers with New England’s rich and famous in the seaside town of Newport, R.I. She thought jazz could entertain where the New York Philharmonic couldn’t. So she and her husband laid out a line of credit, Wein booked some big names (Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday), and the Newport Jazz Festival was born.
Via NPR
