I last attended the Newport Jazz Festival, then known as the JVC Jazz Festival, in 2007. The lineup included Dave Brubeck, Jack DeJohnette, Al Green, B.B. King, Christian McBride, Branford Marsalis, Marcus Miller, Joshua Redman and Susan Tedeschi.
The 2024 Newport Jazz Festival kicks off on Friday, August 2.
The event is sold out so let’s look at the iconic festival’s origin story, the Storyville jazz club in Boston.
In the Newport Jazz Festival’s monthly newsletter, fittingly titled “Storyville,” John Peabody writes:
To go back to the very beginning of Newport Jazz— and really Newport Folk as well— get on Boston’s Green Line and take it to Copley Plaza. Walk one block south on Exeter past the public library to the Copley Plaza Hotel.
Long before Miles played Newport Jazz and said, “I wasn’t real popular at this time, but that began to change after I played at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955.”
Before there was Nina playing Porgy to a hushed audience in 1960, or Duke, who declared, “I was born at Newport in 1956.” Well before Dizzy, Monk, Mingus, Aretha, Frank Zappa, and Led Zeppelin in 1969 and before Common, Norah Jones, Christian McBride, The Roots, and Jon Batiste, there was George Wein, standing in front of the Copley Plaza Hotel in 1950 with dreams of a jazz club he’d call Storyville.
