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Mainstreaming
George Wein sticks with jazz
BY JON GARELICK

George Wein’s Myself Among Others: A Life in Music (Da Capo, 560 pages, $27.50) won’t win any awards as great literature. Wein, the 77-year-old impresario and creator of, among other music events, the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals, and his co-writer, Nate Chinen, could have used an editor to cut away some of the rhetorical deadwood (phrases like "There could be no better way to describe it than this . . . "). And trying to avoid getting trapped in a repetitive chronology, Wein tangles himself in repetitive typicality. Rather than consolidate the cataclysmic events of the late ’60s — musical, political, and social — he spreads them over different chapters regarding the Newport Jazz and Folk Fests. It doesn’t matter — the book is irresistible.

For jazz fans, there’s one behind-the-scenes anecdote after another about the greats from the jazz pantheon: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and on and on. And Wein has more than a few instructive stories for aspiring concert promoters. But as the anecdotes accrue, they begin to resonate with subtexts. This story is about race in America, about entrepreneurship versus art, about the relationship of America’s many marginal subcultures to the wider mainstream.

A self-described middle-class Jewish kid from Newton, Wein married a sophisticated African-American woman from Roxbury, the former Joyce Alexander, and that love for African-American culture in general and a particular African-American woman defines all of his life decisions (the passages regarding integration at Newport and at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival are some of the most stirring in the book). His mantra — "You can’t have a festival without people" — has been used against him; he’s been accused of "selling out" jazz by booking rock bands and pop groups. And indeed he was among the first to sell "title" sponsorships — to Schlitz beer, Kool cigarettes, and, now, JVC.

Wein got into jazz as a fan and a pianist, and when he talks about attending late sets on 52nd Street, indie-rock fans will recognize his propriety feelings about the music. "We could sit within ten feet of the musicians and have the room almost all to ourselves. At times, this seemed like the essence of jazz." Later, when he begins promoting jazz festivals, he realizes that presenting music to thousands of people that "some considered a private reserve" won’t go over with everyone.

Early on, there’s a scene where WW2 GI Wein wins some money shooting craps. You can see the gambler’s instinct in that scene — the taste for risk. There’s also Wein the aspiring jazz pianist who feels he’s not quite good enough to make it as an artist. Worse, he sees the lives of some of the great musicians who are his friends as they scuffle from one engagement to the next, living out of suitcases in hotel rooms, never putting aside enough money to feel secure, all for the chance just to play. It’s not so much his musicianship as the lifestyle that puts Wein off his career as a pianist. He looks at his friends’ lives and realizes he just can’t cut it.

Its his relationship with those artists that carries him through, and that’s another source of his motivation. In the late ’60s, when he has a chance to step into rock promotion, when jazz, as he points out, is losing touch with the mainstream audience, he sticks with jazz. His 1969 Newport Jazz Festival was a huge success ("probably the only time Led Zeppelin shared a bill with Buddy Tate"). So why not rock? As he says, "I had the experience, the organizational staff, and the connections." But he also tells us that despite its success, "The 1969 Newport Jazz Festival had been four of the worst days of my life."

It’s not just the matter of crowd control and the constant near-riot conditions that steer Wein away from rock fests. When he justifies the heavy preponderance of soul and R&B acts in his 1970s festivals in the Midwest, he says, "There was a fundamental difference between soul and rock performances, a distinction that went further than the issue of sound or style; it had to do with the communication between artist and audience. The African-American soul performer conveyed a certain earthiness that resonated with the lives of the fans. By contrast, the rock performer conveyed an otherworldliness far removed from those lives. So while the soul artist presented a reflection of his or her audience’s familiar longings and hopes and frustrations, the rock artist mainly sold a means of escape."

I could argue with Wein on the particulars: artists like Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder — heck, Dicky Barrett — do speak to the condition of their listeners’ lives. On the other hand, to be a rock fan, you have to have a taste for sonic overload and for what the critic Robert Palmer called "the church of the electric guitar." I get Wein’s point, and it makes me trust him all the more. For this entrepreneur, jazz, like soul music, is indeed a business, but it’s also an extension of who he is.


Issue Date: August 1 - August 7, 2003
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