Our Man in Jazz (Page 2)

Memoirs are often occasions for delicious score-settling, and this one doesn't disappoint. Wein rips the town of Newport, placing the blame for the 1960 riots that almost destroyed him on greedy saloonkeepers, blinkered local officials and lackadaisical police. He scorns rock culture, which nearly capsized him a decade later, when jazz hit another commercial low. In 1971, the Newport Jazz Festival presented the Allman Brothers Band, whose album Live at the Fillmore East lured post-Woodstock thousands Wein characterizes as "maniacs";he observes bitterly, "It was like observing lemurs at the zoo; they were zonked." They pushed down his fences while the town shrugged. The following year, the Newport Jazz Festival moved to New York City.

Among many personal paybacks, some inevitably self-serving, Wein drolly skewers the widely disliked and feared Albert Grossman, who managed Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. When Grossman moved from Chicago, he crashed for months at the Weins' West Side apartment; they would all too often come home to find him smoking a hookah pipe and be awakened nightly by phone calls from his shadowy creditors. One of the triumvirate behind the Newport Folk Festival, Grossman, the cutthroat businessman-thug, figures alongside Seeger, the determined idealist, as a foil for Wein, the pragmatist seeking to translate art into paying entertainment to sustain art, fighting an ongoing battle with varying success to keep up with audience tastes and musical trends. In this context, it's revealing that only Pete and Toshi Seeger join Joyce among the book's dedicatees.

Ideals aside, the pragmatist had more commercial lives than a cat. Despite trying to lure young rock and blues fans to his festivals, by the early 1970s Wein was deep in debt, thanks to jazz's market erosion. In the mid-1970s he teamed with Kool cigarettes, becoming the first to tap deep corporate pockets for pop-music presentations. Kool sponsored a nationwide string of jazz fests, targeted mostly at black audiences, that featured as much soul music as jazz. They made Wein rich even as (overwhelmingly white) jazz fans and critics cried betrayal--although today that same stylistic mix predominates in Harlem, DC and Oakland clubs. By 1980, with Kool buoying Festival Productions, Wein's annual salary was $100,000 (not including perks like travel and expenses); he wasn't, he insists, rich until Kool bought the Newport name that year for $1.3 million.

Wein's Seegeresque sides shine through the Newport Folk Festival and its nonprofit cousin, the widely beloved New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The Crescent City fest's "local" stages host a wealth of regional talent often unheard beyond Louisiana and Texas, enhanced by indigenous food and folklore, and its foundation doles out money locally. The racial twists of its history are especially fascinating. In 1962, approached by city fathers about a jazz festival in the pre-Civil Rights Act South, Wein observed dryly, "You know, Duke Ellington is accustomed to being treated as royalty wherever he goes. He stays in the finest hotels. But I understand that your hotels are segregated and will not accept blacks as guests." He noted that many jazz bands were integrated. The city fathers agreed the time was not yet ripe for a New Orleans jazz festival. In 1968 they came back to him, discovered his wife was black, and instead hired Wein's former colleague Willis Conover.

A year later, they came back yet again--a sweet triumph that allowed Wein to radically reconceive the festival. "After Woodstock," he writes, "it had become clear to me that young people would no longer sit in reserved seats at an outdoor concert event. They wanted the freedom to move around and be part of what was happening." It was set at a racetrack. This concept has made the New Orleans Jazz Festival Wein's most enduring success. But in 1977, it came under attack by black activists, who threatened, "We're going to force you to take more blacks on to the board of directors. You have been ripping off black culture." Wein's characteristic response: "You can't force us to do what we want to do in the first place."The infusion of new blood created dissension and power struggles on his board that took years to work out. But he stuck with it.

At heart, The Man remained a Fan. His psychological acuity with musicians is demonstrated in backstage anecdotes. Famously crusty Art Tatum fondly played requests for Joyce and George at Storyville after hours. Unlike most promoters, Wein handled the eccentric Monk straightforwardly, like a rational adult, and got results: One night, after yelling at him to get onstage, Wein was aghast at the "payback" set, a forty-five-minute drum solo; he confronted Monk and explained, "I had to run up and down those stairs six times to get you on the stage and I'm getting too old and fat to do that." "Then I don't blame you for yelling at me," said the famously difficult pianist, who never repeated the behavior.

A rare impresario, Wein also learned to get the best from his artists by limiting his role to business and not trying to dictate their creative choices--about what material they'd perform at his shows, for instance. When he planned a 1957 Newport all-star gala in Armstrong's honor with manager Joe Glaser, Satchmo, vehement about controlling his sets, blew it off onstage. When he told Gillespie not to "clown" at the 1954 festival because he was afraid of critics' reactions, the quickwitted trumpeter dissed him for years. And there are revealing, often funny backstage moments with everyone from Ellington to Davis.

As it winds through Wein's complicated life, this memoir unveils his complexity: his stubborn convictions, his pugnacious diplomacy, his financial and psychological savvy. Take, for example, his thick-skinned reaction to criticism. Many jazz critics, including yours truly, have sharpened their claws on him only to be invited to discuss, if not resolve, differences. Or take his sense of loyalty: He boasts that all key Festival Productions staffers have been in place for twenty to fifty years. That toughness and generosity lighten his book's most memorable moments.

There are two words in "music business," musicians like to say, implicitly complaining about the inequalities between them. In music history, George Wein's virtues reside in how he consistently tried to make those two words harmonize. Myself Among Others invaluably documents how and why.

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