E-Mail This Article to a Friend Chuck you, Farley! (continued)

BY THE END OF SATURDAY, I was concerned to find that, despite the likes of McBride and Coltrane the Younger, and Harry Connick Jr. in his spare, non-singing, jazz-quartet mode, I was ready to give up on the "target demographic" in favor of the 80ish crowd of Terry, Brubeck (who also tore down the house), and Haynes. Cullum, 24, had made his debut on the main stage, no less, but his Ben-Folds-meets-Billy-Joel routine seemed in sum as good as neither, though I preferred his piano playing to his cutesy vocalizing and irrepressible energy. Leaping across the stage, banging his feet (and head!) on the keyboard — why not set the damned piano on fire, à la Jerry Lee Lewis, and be done with it?

But Sunday morning, thirtysomething guitarist/vocalist Doug Wamble allowed me once again to see jazz future, with his idiosyncratic blend of country, blues, gospel, and bebop. Fronting a quartet, he played and sang each note with a clear emotional intent that put him on a par with McBride, and in its spiritual depth, his set was as much a tribute to Coltrane as anything I heard the rest of the weekend. Who else could cover Mahalia Jackson’s "Rockin’ in Jerusalem" and Peter Gabriel’s "Washing of the Water" and make them both his?

An addition this year was a third stage for piano solos and duets. Most of Saturday’s piano sets were given over to NPR Piano Jazz host Marian McPartland, who used her charm to persuade Dianne Reeves’s pianist, Peter Martin, to try an Ornette Coleman piece he didn’t know, "Turnaround" ("not one of his dangerous tunes"), and got the crowd roaring as the two keyboardists built to the kind of spontaneous consonances Ornette himself would appreciate.

On Sunday, the piano stage was a murderers’ row of talent — Harold Mabern, Uri Caine, James Moran, Bill Charlap, and Geri Allen with her husband, Wallace Roney. (This last was maybe the festival’s one strategic error, since Roney’s trumpet kept intruding on Lee Konitz’s set at the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts stage, the only interference I heard all weekend.) Caine was lucid and hyperbolic, segueing from one tune to the next mostly without a break. Moran played in unison with a taped female Turkish tour guide ("Straight outta Istanbul") and also did Afrika Bambaataa’s "Planet Rock."

At this point, the schedule became merciless. Violinist Regina Carter was up against the main-stage Cos of Good Music, which turned out to be another of Bill Cosby’s pointless musical projects in which perfectly excellent musicians submit themselves to his whimsy as a bandleader. When I left Dave Douglas and Roswell Rudd at the Dunkin’ Donuts stage to catch the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the LCJOs were in the midst of "Rockin’ in Rhythm," its rich detail and synchromesh design a sharp contrast to Mingus’s broad, brawny strokes. Then it was over to Konitz with trumpeter Roy Hargrove, a one-off pairing in which Konitz reminded the crowd that "Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, not Miles Davis," wrote "Solar." When I returned to the main stage, James Carter was helping the LCJOs re-create Ellington ’56, playing the Paul Gonsalves tenor part on "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" while drummer Herlin Riley kicked the band, and the crowd, to shouting abandon. Then it was over to the elegant Heath Brothers (bassist Percy, saxophonist Jimmy, and drummer Albert "Tootie") for one quick tune before it was time to catch Ornette Coleman.

Coleman, now 74, is these days playing with two bassists, Tony Falanga, who bows, and Greg Cohen, who plucks, and his son, drummer Denardo Coleman. At Newport, the distractions are often part of the music — the span of the Newport Bridge, the sailboats, a kid in a Smiths T-shirt, sunbathers, food, laughing picnickers, chirping cell phones. Now the gray skies had darkened and the seagulls were coasting, looking for late-afternoon scraps. Coleman doesn’t play a lot of live shows, and I often find it difficult to separate foreground from background in his concerts. Wearing an iridescent plaid suit of greens and purples and yellows, Ornette played lines that were alternately joyous and mournful in front of what drummer George Schuller backstage later called a "web of bass." Denardo’s drumming was a busy murk. The "free" accompaniment, the dark skies, the scavenger gulls made Ornette, with his lovely folk-like melodies, sound all the more vulnerable. When he played his great ballad "Lonely Woman," the effect was almost unbearable.

The supergroup of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, and Brian Blade closed out the night, and their set too was free-ranging, ruminative, often tempo-less, nothing like the fast, furious, and pointed work that all but Blade had done with Miles Davis. This was history too, but it referred to nothing but itself, and it was a fitting close to Newport’s 50th anniversary.