As the future of the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals continues to unfold, its recorded past has suddenly been thrown open.
Recently the festivals themselves almost disappeared, amid the financial collapse of their producing company, the Festival Network LLC. They returned last summer in a new guise, at their usual site, onceGeorge Wein, the founder of both festivals, regained the right to hold music events there.
It’s a complicated story. But if you want to know why the Newport Jazz Festival has been so important to American music, it’s easy: you just have to hear the recorded evidence. Bits and pieces have emerged over the years, in live recordings by Ellington, Coltrane and others. Now Wolfgang’s Vault, the online concert-recording archive, intends to fill in the gaps.
The company, based in San Francisco, bought the archives of the Newport festivals from the Festival Network last year. Bill Sagan, founder and chief executive of Wolfgang’s Vault, says the archives include many, many tapes: 1,000 to 1,200 individual performances, dating at least to 1955, the festival’s second year, and continuing to the end of the century. It is not a complete audio record — certain years contain only a small number of performances, or are missing completely — but it is a major one nonetheless.
Since the purchase, Wolfgang’s Vault has spent almost $5 million, Mr. Sagan said, on making audio transfers and mixes of the tapes. (Neither Mr. Sagan nor Chris Shields of the Festival Network would reveal the amount spent on acquiring the archive itself.) On Wednesday the company will begin posting free streams of a handful of performances from the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival, atwolfgangsvault.com: the first offerings include Count Basie, Dakota Staton and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. By next Tuesday, when more are added, there will be 27 sets from that year’s jazz festival, including some by Ahmad Jamal, Joe Williams, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver. The plan is to have hundreds more online in the coming months, from other years of Newport Jazz and from the Newport Folk Festival as well.
For jazz fans, this is serious business. There are chillingly good performances in the 1959 crop, from half-inch three-track tapes mixed for stereo, made with stage microphones that pick up the nuances of the drums and the growls of the band members. They’re strong enough in some cases to deepen our understanding of canonical artists, like Basie, or restore the reputation of nearly forgotten ones, like Staton. (The concerts can also be downloaded for $10 to $13 in higher-quality audio.)
Projects of this kind have in the past been plagued by questions involving copyright. When Mr. Sagan bought the archive of Bill Graham Presents six years ago, there was a lawsuit from performers and record labels, but it was eventually dismissed.
Mr. Sagan said he had done due diligence regarding copyrights with the Newport material and is paying the performers or their estates a generous royalty rate.
But there is uncertainty over who made the recordings. Mr. Sagan’s contract with the Festival Network says that Mr. Wein made the tapes and originally owned both the tapes and rights to them. Mr. Wein, for his part, says he never made recordings until much later.
“I never made tapes back then,” he said in a telephone interview. “I was never an archive person, either. I just didn’t pay any attention to it.” Speaking of the rights, he added, “If the tapes are from the ’50s, chances are they were owned by record companies.”
Fifty years ago, according to the jazz historian Phil Schaap, only record companies were generally willing to lug high-quality gear to a concert site. (It’s fair to assume, also, that the 1959 tapes were not made by the Voice of America, which did record a great deal of the festival, but made its tapes in mono.) Mr. Sagan said his agreement with the Festival Network is specific on the subject of the recordings. “In the agreement,” he said, “Festival Network represents that they or a predecessor company recorded these recordings. They secondarily represented that they owned these recordings, and they thirdly represented that they owned the intellectual property and copyrights to these recordings. And when they made those representations, George Wein was an employee of the company.” Mr. Shields, chief executive of the Festival Network, was unavailable for comment on Tuesday. Meanwhile, we have great and vivid jazz: Staton’s blue wails; the gruff, excited shouts of the Basie band’s brass section during an aggressive solo by the trombonist Al Grey; the masterful attack-and-release of the Ahmad Jamal trio on “Poinciana.”
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