“THE WORLD’S leading jazz ritual,” wrote Ben Bagdikian in the Providence Journal on Friday, July 1, “opened at Newport last night as a mature international institution complete with foreign coverage, lawsuits, and bitter competition.”
By Sunday, July 3, the Festival had burst in its “maturity,” having been canceled by Newport officials as the aftermath of ugly Saturday night rioting involving twelve thousand teenagers and postgraduate adolescents. And the Festival’s demise received unprecedently extensive foreign and domestic coverage. Tass, in fact, offered a Journal photographer a sizable sum for his riot pictures; but the cameraman, a staunch patriot, sold the negatives instead to Life.
There was even an added lawsuit by Monday, July 4. The Festival had already been coping with one $100,000 legal action by Mrs. Elaine Lorillard, divorced wife of Louis Lorillard, who largely under-writes the affair. Mrs. Lorillard had been cashiered from the Board of Directors during her marital wars and now claims that she deserved compensation for having originally thought up the idea of the Newport Jazz Stock Car Races.
The second pre-riot law suit was for $75,000 and was instituted by a New York producer of fashion shows who claimed she had not been paid for expenses connected with a fashion “festival” she had arranged for the N.J.F. last year. The thirdmand newestmsuit was one threatened by the Festival producers themselves. As of this writing, they say they will sue the city of Newport for canceling the Festival and for not having taken sufficient precautions to avert the Saturday night violence.
As one who has wearily attended all but one of the Newport Jazz Festivals, I was not surprised at the drnouement nor can I feel sorrow for either the Festival promoters or the city merchants who so consciencelessly benefited from the Festival. For once, both sides got what they deserved.
The “bitter competition” cited by Bagdikian in his Friday morning lead was meanwhile still alive Sunday night after the overblown Festival had been punctured. The small, rival “musicians’ festival” had been organized, staffed and produced by jazz musicians. Their site was Cliff Walk Manor, a few blocks from vast Freebody Park where the “official” Festival was being held. The musicians, protesting the venality of the Newport chariot races, had this year been holding concerts in direct competition to each of the Freebody events. The rump session had started anemically, but attendanc continued to grow; and by Sunday night—with the big Festival and all the bars in Newport dosed down—some six hundred paid five dollars a head at Cliff Walk to drink Coke and just listen to jazz for four hours.
The musicians—among them Charlie Mingus and Max Roach, the leaders of the rebellion—were protesting the phoniness of the Newport Festival. Althoug still technically “non-profit” for tax purposes, th NJ.F. had become increasingly concerned through the years with amassing the largest possible gate receipt (“jazz as an art form” be damned). The N.J.F. still scheduled a few experimental units and historica lectures during the poorly attended—and poorly promoted—afternoon concerts; but at night the N.J.F. crammed as many big names as they could find into al most every concert and sometimes didn’t care whethe the “names” had much to do with jazz or not. Eartha Kitt, the Kingston Trio and Pat Suzuki had been amon previous ringers at the N.LF., and there had also bee such embarrassing side shows as the 1959 fashion exhibit which led to this year’s law suit and the im pounding of the Saturday night N.J.F. receipts.
THE FESTIVAL, in short, was largely to blame for its own cancellation because in grabbing for more and more bigness each year, it had encouraged the conviction among thousands of teenagers that Newport had become a carnival town over the July 4 weekend. Neither the beer-drinkers nor the musicians had any illusions left that the N.J.F. had anything basically to do with “art.” It had become a money-grubbing enterprise of the same genre as bargain basement sales and any giant midway composed of shell games, taffy candy, freak shows and thrill-rides.
By moving into Freebody Park several years ago, the NJ.F. had further underlined its primary concern with mass audiences and mass tastes. The Park has all the intimacy of Yankee Stadium, and the only listeners who are near enough to the stage to get an adequate perspective of the proceedings are the box-holding socialites and the press. Some of the plebeian ticket-buyers can absorb some of what’s going on if they listen hard enough, but most spend the evening guzzling beer and humling female friends.
Unsatiated, the N.I.F. this year even added to the seating capacity of Freebody Park, making 16,500 places available to music-lovers. In fairness, it should be noted that this year the NJ.F. finally yielded to en’ticism of its programming policies. There were fewer groups on each program so that each had sufficient time to build a balanced program; and this year no Suznkis or Kitts were hired. But N.J.F.’s tardy repentance in this area was too little and too late.
Another cumulative grievance among musicians—and a basic reason for the rebellion at Cliff Walk—-was the N.J.F.’s cavalier financial attitude toward jazzmen who lacked mass name appeal but who were recognized by their colleagues as among the most important of current contributors to the music. A Louis Armstrong or a Benny Goodman had the box office appeal and a tough booking office to get top fees from the N.J.F., but the less widely renowned jazzmen were often pressured into coming to Newport for smaller sums than they deserved. And this year the economic pressures against the musicians without mass “name” value increased.
Few of these factors in many musicians’ anger at the N.J.F. have ever been covered in the flabby jazz trade press. The widely-printed Leonard Feather wrote in the 1959 NJ.F. program, for example, that “the initiation in this country of the large, spectacular, outdoor jazz event has been both cause and effect of a maturing interest in jazz as a whole. The American attitude toward jazz as an art form has improved measurably [since the N.J.F. began, in July, 1954].”
The day before this year’s riots, I was lectured in a similar vein by a Newport official. Ignoring the beer cans strewn along the streets and the drunken teenagers, high at noon, he said: “You keep forgetting how much dignity the Festival has brought to jazz.” I saw him the morning after the National Guard had been called out, and observed that if the N.J.F. brought a little more dignity to the town, Newport would blow up.
In this year’s official program book jazz writer Ira Gitler also apologized for the Festival. Among other proofs of its goodness, he cited the fact “that two-thirds of the money from refreshment sales [inside the park] goes to the Kiwanis Club of Newport and the Newport Boys Club, who put it to worthy uses.” The fact that these refreshment stands have always sold as much beer as any youngster could hold is apparently more than compensated for by the fact that it’s all in a good cause.
A more realistic observer of the N.J.F. has been Murray Kempton of the New York Post. In January, 1960, he wrote of “the gentry in the front row with their Martini shakers, the sailors squatting in the back, their heads between their knees, unchueking their beer … Was ever anything in America at once so fashionable and so squalid”
THE TOWN, to return to the riots themselves, was indeed as responsible for the inevitable explosion as the N.J.F. It was all too evident last year that the streets were unsafe at night during the Festival, and one police otfieial noted this winter that he was still amazed that somehow a riot had been averted last year. It is also true that the NJ.F. added more Pinkertons to its staff policing Freebody Park and asked the Newport city manager for more police throughout the town before the Festival began. The city manager refused, saying that his present force was adequate. Why, after all, run up additional expenses? But on June 16, the Rhode Island Public Safety Commissioner said: “It’s a tough situation down there and they’re asking for trouble if they close their eyes to it.”
By Friday afternoon, it was evident there would be serious trouble. Although there were signs warning that drinking on the street and loitering on the sidewalks would not be permitted, the police made practically no moves to stop either. On Friday night, thirty-nine revelers were arrested; there were scores of fights in the town and on the beach where the police again allowed hundreds of potential spenders to sleep. At the Viking Hotel, four youngsters flooded the second-floor corridor; and the atmosphere in the hotel was such that a room clerk, pretending to be the manager, literally broke into my room at 3 a.m. to demand whether I was married to my wife.
The Newport Daily News on Saturday morning gave a “sampling” of the previous night’s incidents: “Eight youths jumped onto a car being driven along Pelham Street and smashed two of its windows. A sailor was held for ripping the radio microphone off a police cruiser…. As usual, the bulk of the trouble took place outside Freebody Park. Inside, control was easier in the illuminated area. But the park itself was not exactly a Sunday-school picnic grounds. Boys and girls looking as young as fourteen or fifteen were drinking beer and feeling its effects… . This morning jazz fans were waiting outside the cafes and barrooms for the opening hours.”
The Saturday night explosion has been relatively well covered nationally, often on the basis of rewrites of Ben Bagdikian’s first-rate reporting for the Providence Journal. Although the rioting started near Freebody Park, Newport as a whole was aflame, and the violence spread rapidly. The police, who had not been tough enough during the previous two days, were being treated with contempt by the teenagers. Jack Williams in the Providence lournal observed; “I have experienced genuine fear twice in my life. Once was in combat in Europe during World War II; the other was Saturday night in Newport.” Police and military police were bloodied—and some were knocked unconscious—by full cans of beer hurled by the youths. Youngsters urged other teenagers on to attack the police. “Reeling youths,” said Williams, “kept rallying their forces for new assaults on the police. ‘Kill the cops,’ one youth cried as he tossed a full can of beer at a car…. “
The Providence Journal described the scene before the tear gas arrived: ” … hundreds of cans and bottles came flying through the night to the men pinned down on the center of the block and troopers, many of them with bloody faces, kept asking, ‘When are they going to fire that gas.’”
IN CONTRAST to the chaos in the streets, the “musicians’ festival” at Cliff Walk was continuing in complete calm. The musicians had handled everything from the beginning—tickets, press, promotion. They had set up the chairs, stitched the canvas for tents; and ringed one side of the outside auditorium with tents in which they slept. They did their own programming and their own announcing. Some even successfully passed the hat among free-loaders who were listening to the music outside the fence.
The musicians who had been contracted for the main festival sympathized with the dissidents. A few came to visit the rebels; others were afraid to lest the “establishment” retaliate economically. Pressure, in fact, had been placed on Cliff Walk by the city, and several musicians felt the N.J.F. had been back of some of it. The day before both festivals began, the city council, without a hearing, had banned outside amplification at Cliff Walk and had complained about its sanitary facilities (a particularly outrageous irony in view of the appalling washrooms at Freebody Park, where, incidentally, musicians are allotted two pails behind the stage). The owner of the Cliff Walk, Nick Cannarozzi, is, however, a tough, successful businessman who will not be intimidated. He ordered the outside amplification continued, and the police yielded.
“I hear,” said one drummer at Freebody Park, “that they’re really cooking over at Cliff Walk. Well, you play better when you’re mad.”
Yet the music at Cliff Walk, while intense, was also subtle. During the worst of the street rioting on Saturday night, trumpeter Roy Eldridge was blowing a softly muted solo as drummer Jo Jones accompanied him in a complex, polyrhythmie display of superbly tasteful rhythmic accenting—all done with just fingers and palms, no sticks or brushes. Roy had earlier decided not to play for the rebels. “My fighting days are over,” he had sighed. Yet, seeing patriarch Coleman Hawkins as one of the more determined dissidents, Roy finally also joined in.
A Time correspondent at Cliff Walk was becoming cumulatively frustratedmbefore the rioting—at his inability to convince the New York office that the story of the rump festival was important enough to get into the music section. “Actually, it belongs in National Affairs,” he was saying fiercely. “This is like an extension of the sit-ins. I called it a sit-out.”
Bassist Chaflie Mingus, who had earlier been pounding a tent stake with a huge rock, was now prowling around the entrance, trying to stop multiple use of single tickets. “It’s tough to play, man, while you’ve got all this on your mind. But somebody had to do it.” Jo Jones, a father figure to many young jazz players, meanwhile was explaining to a newspaperman: “The big festival forgot about the music, but these little kiddies,” he pointed to some modernists on the stand, “have got to have a chance to be heard. That’s one reason we did this.”
“Now this,” Mingus waved at the Cliff Walk musicians playing with the sea and the beach as a background, “is what Newport jazz was supposed to be. But I think we started this too late to save the town for jazz.”
SOME of the aftermath of the Newport breakdown was nearly as illuminating as the debacle itself. Bill Coss, editor of Metronome, a quasi-jazz magazine, sent a letter to all the papers—and some printed it—claiming that “if there is fault to be found it is not with jazz, or with festivals, but with the city management which had not properly geared its enforcements agency [sic] to be able to stop the unlawful drinking in the first place, the massing together in the second.” Aside from Mr. Coss’ oddly selective interpretation of the facts, the most beguiling aspect of his pronouncements was that he hadn’t been at Newport this year at all.
On the Mutual Network the next week, Pegeen Fitzgerald revealed that the riots had not been spontaneous, but like those in Japan, Korea and Turkey, had been Communist-inspired. (Tass presumably had helped set up the violence, but had forgotten to assign a cameraman there.)
A more accurate assessment of the rioters was made by Phyllis Battelle in the New York Journal-American: “The Newport rioters were definitely not delinquents with holes in their pockets. These were ‘good’ boys and girls from ‘better’ families and colleges.” Father Norman J. O’Connor, chaplain of the Newman Club of Boston University and a regular guest at jazz events, festive and otherwise, agreed in the Boston Globe: “It was a college crowd … with a good sprinkling of juniors and seniors from high schools. It was a crowd that had money because the great share of them were traveling the streets in … sports cars . . , and convertibles … Parents must not care if sons and daughters sleep out all night on beaches, in cars, or not at all. Parents no longer care if teenagers come home at night or not. Parents no longer care about the drinking habits of their children.”
The New York Herald Tribune editorialized sadly: “Perhaps the most discouraging aspect of the whole sorry mess was the emptiness and futility of it all. American youth hit some sort of a new low in Newport this weekend. Here was mass violence—vicious violence, potentially lethal missiles hurled at total strangers—with neither point nor reason, done by several thousand of those bright college students who supposedly are our hope for tomorrow. In capitals around the world, desperately earnest students have lately been demonstrating, often rioting, for causes. Some of these have been good causes, some bad: it is as if a contagion of violent fervor were overleaping national boundaries and spreading from university to university. But these young Americans had no cause. They were rioting for nothing but the perverse pleasure of violence. Theirs was hedonism gone wild, an irresponsible animal self-indulgence that reflects discredit on their generation.”
BACK in Newport, the town had quieted down by Sunday. Most of the youths fined were over twenty-one (to prove, said one newspaperman sardonically, “that liquor wasn’t sold to minors”). At the rival festival, several dissidents told reporters they were sorry the N.J.F. had ended. All, that is, but Charlie Mingus, an irrepressibly honest man who said: “That’s the way it should be. They deserve it because … they lost their true identity with jazz.”
There was already grumbling among the town merchants about the loss of business next year and the mayor, James L. Maher, who had voted against canceling the Festival, said hopefully: “I’d like to see it back next year; if given a chance, it can develop enough.” Ward Harvey, president of the Community Hotel Corporation and owner of the Viking Hotel, which has a considerable financial stake in whether the Festival continues in Newport, said he expected there would be an attempt to hold the Festival in Newport next year. And that lover of jazz added: “I’m one hundred per cent in favor of such a movement.”
There were counter-rumors. Director George Wein was quoted as saying the next N.J.F. might take place in Yankee Stadium, a notable showcase for the arts. Father O’Connor wrote with uncharacteristic ingenuousness: “Strangely, cities and towns with reputations similar to Newport have already bid for the Festival to come to them, regardless of the problems.”
On one train back from Newport, Miff Mole, an elderly jazzman who had been a major figure in the twenties but is now practically unknown, was depressed. He had been ill for some time, but had gathered up what he could of his strength to make an appearance at the Sunday night Festival. It had been canceled, and he might not get such an invitation again. Some college kids on the train began mocking him as “a broken-down jazz musician.” When he didn’t respond, they began talking about the “counterattack” they’d mount against the cops next year.
A reporter meanwhile was reading a New York Post interview with Alfred Kazin. “Kazin,” said the interviewer, “visited the Soviet Union last year as part of a State Department exchange. He found that Soviet life confirmed his lifelong criticism of Communism: the leadership is dishonest and as a result, the entire society corrupts itself by practicing deceit and falsehood, even though materially the society has advanced by leaps and bounds.”
