The Jazz Festival Grows Up

To the Jazz Musician, nearly all of the summer "festivals" that purport to celebrate his "art" are just another gig. The money is somewhat better out-of-doors, but the playing conditions are usually worse and the promoters are no less rhomboid than the average night-club owner. "This," Miles Davis once said while appraising the July emigration to Newport, Rhode Island, "is a jazz supermarket." Mr. Davis has since included all the festivals he has played within that condemnation, and he expresses the consensus of a large majority of the jazz confraternity.

There is, however, an exception—the annual Monterey, California, Jazz Festival. Last summer was the fourth of the Monterey events, and once again the concerts were characterized by the singular enthusiasm and conscientiousness of most of the musicians involved. Even those, moreover, who were required to participate in morning rehearsals awoke with uncommon alacrity and no little anticipation. On the second day of the festival, for example, a trumpet player who had been up until five at a particularly vigorous party was warming up on the grounds five hours later. "I don't know what it is about Monterey," he said, "but I don't feel beat. It seems natural to be up this early here."

A couple of hours later, at the sprawling, rustic Monterey Fairgrounds, a lithe young woman in slacks pushed a carriage with a dozing baby along the lawn. Pyramiding sounds of brass players warming up came from the sizable but compact outdoor arena where a horse show had taken place a month before. She passed by 10 cops, squatting in the grass, swapping beatnik stories.

A trailer was parked near the main entrance. It proclaimed itself a "Peace Mailbox," and cut into its side was a slot for postcards to be sent to the United (continued on page 146) Jazz festival grows up (continued from page 125) Nations demanding complete world disarmament. The missives were provided by a beaming pacifist.

"I never expected to get inside the grounds," the pacifist told a teenage sympathizer, "but one of the officials invited me in off the road and told me I could set up here."

"You're lucky you didn't try Newport," said the teenager. "They wouldn't have let you into the town. At festival time they figure everything's dangerous. Even peace."

The night before, while a capacity crowd of 7300 had stoked the egos of Dizzy Gillespie, J. J. Johnson, Carmen McRae and George Shearing inside the arena, some 3000 freeloaders sat, talked and nuzzled on the grounds outside. Except for intersecting obbligatos of bongo drums, they were as relaxed and peaceable as the paying public.

From a gaggle of booths, both contingents bought beer, hot dogs, enchiladas and hot pastrami sandwiches, the latter supplied by a delegation of chirruping Beth Israel ladies. Elsewhere victuals were being supplied by such special-interest groups as the Senior Citizens of Monterey and the League of Musicians' Wives ("Encourage live music... Promote community goodwill for musicians"). There were also exhibits of photographs, high fidelity equipment, and a booth transformed into a record store. Throughout the 24-acre fairgrounds, the tempo of enjoyment was ramblingly unhurried.

"My God, it is a festival," said a recording company executive startled at stumbling into one of the ubiquitous flower boxes on the paths.

The listeners, strollers and bongo players varied widely in dress and economic status. Local socialites gawked at bearded Beats from Big Sur and San Francisco's North Beach, although the Beats did not appear reciprocally intrigued. One matron was disappointed: "There were four of those people with leather jackets and sandals and beards. They were swigging a liquid, and it turned out to be orange juice. Such wild behavior!"

Amid all the swarming euphoria and sight-seeing, the cops could find only three drunks whom they bundled away with quick, silent efficiency.

Throughout the festival, two bars with open, circular fireplaces were available for those who wanted surcease from the music. The Hunt Club, an alfresco refuge, was for the laity. Around the corner from it was the Lower Hunt Club, a closed-in meeting place for the musicians, their friends (old and instant) and the press. This cheerful room for the performers is unique to Monterey, because at nearly all other major jazz festivals the musicians are restricted to a narrow ghetto backstage filled with disintegrating stage managers, lost band chicks and glowering cops.

Jazzmen, being perpetual travelers, seldom have a chance to meet in convention, and those who converged on Monterey delighted in exchanging tales of triumph and complaint between sets.

"For an ofay," a young drummer said solemnly to a critic, "I'm one of the loosest drummers around."

"You play such a lyrical saxophone," a slender girl with hopeful eyes said huskily to Paul Desmond.

"No," he looked down at her benignly, "it's a Selmer saxophone."

"I saw Bud Powell in Paris," a musician told his colleagues. "You know, his kid knows all the old bop tunes. Bud's in pretty good shape. It's got to be an improvement just being that far away from Birdland."

"So Stan Kenton said to me, 'Shine those cymbals!'" a side man said to a semicircle of fellow privates. "With him it's not so much how the drums sound, but whether the set shines."

In another knot at the bar, a young man said urgently, "I feel about Dizzy the way Louis Armstrong put it about himself, 'Everything I do is special.'"

Ben Webster, the big, broad tenor saxophonist, walked in, his camera around his neck. Dizzy Gillespie saw him, whooped, and gathered him into a back-thumping hug. "Man, you must have shot a thousand pictures!"

"Yeah," Ben rumbled reflectively, "but I'm going to need a gig for the bread to have them printed."

"I've met you before, Mr. Gillespie," said a young lady, who had squeezed beside him at the bar.

Dizzy grinned at her. "If you know me, kiss me!"

Dizzy looked at his watch. "We're on." He seemed eager to go back. Spreading his hands wide, he jiggled away from the bar. "I feel so loose out there!"

"It sure is different here," said Harry Carney, the bulky, serene baritone saxophonist whose journeys with Duke Ellington have taken him to every jazz festival in the country, and then back again. "We even get started on time. Do you know what happened to us atÈNewport this year? We were due on at 10 and didn't start playing until half past one the next morning."

Monterey is indeed organically different from nearly all the other jazz festivals that have increased summer income for jazzmen and local police since the initial Newport rites in 1954. Some of these ballooning celebrations have collapsed of overweight caused by what amateur sociologists in the trade term "the Newport syndrome." That event, organized as a nonprofit project "to encourage America's enjoyment of jazz and to sponsor the study of jazz, a true American art form," soon became transformed into a shaky monument to greed.

Anxious to keep the box-office figures climbing, Newport Festival strategists hired jazzmen by the crate; and to lure a larger audience than jazz itself can attract, they added such peripheral acts as the Kingston Trio and Eartha Kitt. As the Newport Festival increasingly resembled a bibulous Disneyland, the burghers of the town industriously sold as much beer—more and more of it by the case—as the visitors could carry. The age of the consumers was irrelevant to the mercenary natives as well as to the police who ignored the cars full of roosterlike adolescents awash with beer and the swaggering packs of overprivileged delinquents on the streets. When no more rooms were available, the invaders camped blearily on the beach, and the merchants ordered more beer.

Inevitably, of course, this first and most abundant of American jazz festivals swelled into a menace to the public weal, and during the rioting in 1960, the nonprofit monstrosity had to be reduced to responsibility by clubs and tear gas. For a time it appeared that the Newport Festival had been exiled. Yet no town voluntarily rejects an extra million dollars' worth of business a year, and in 1961, a Newport Festival under new management arose from the rusty beer cans. There were more than enough steel-helmeted police to insure unconditional peace and judicious, nonpublic drinking habits.

Otherwise, however, no lessons had been learned. The new uplifters of our national art form hired at least 237 performers, including Judy Garland and a 30-piece escort, for four evening and three afternoon concerts. The programs were too long, and, with few exceptions, the musicians were on for too short a time. "I could have phoned my part in," Oscar Peterson observed morosely.

By the summer of 1962, however, Newport had changed radically and illustrated a much more venturesome approach to programing than at any other time in its history—except for its first year. Newport, in fact, now shows strong signs of becoming an Eastern Monterey.

Elsewhere on the summer circuit, a well-merited trend toward financial misfortune, already in evidence the previous summer, gathered momentum in 1961. The Randalls Island Festival in New York, which hired more talent than Michael Todd could have juggled, played to only half of capacity. As usual, the timing was as efficient as on the set of an Elizabeth Taylor movie. The Basie band, due to perform one night at nine, wasn't called to glory until four and a half hours later. (This summer, the Randalls Island promoter resignedly omitted all but a few big jazz names from his season-long concerts and substituted such distinctly nonjazz headliners as Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope.) Another evidence of the declining jazz festival occurred at Buffalo last year, where attendance fell off sharply from the previous inaugural event. The Indiana Jazz Festival at French Lick, more intelligently programed than most—the inexplicable presence of jolly Al Hirt and his Dixieland Rascals excepted—was also a financial disappointment.

In Detroit, the third annual Festival of American Music—a permissive title that allowed the booking of Julie London and Bobby Troup—beguiled neither the audience nor the promoter. There were a couple of more modest, reasonably conceived conclaves, particularly the third Virginia Èeach Festival in Virginia; but as a whole, the jazz festival phenomenon appeared to be fading in 1961.

There was, however, in Monterey, California, a major jazz festival. Musicians, the most mordant of all festival critics, reported that Monterey not only seemed to be nurtured with affection for and some knowledge of jazz, but had survived the deficit years while retaining comparative musical integrity.

For several years before it materialized in Monterey in 1958, the idea of a West Coast jazz festival had been a fond fantasy of Jimmy Lyons, a civilized disc jockey, and Ralph Gleason, a remarkably unpretentious jazz critic. The Monterey Peninsula, between San Francisco and Los Angeles, had come to depend on tourists—or "visitors" as the current native euphemism has it—for a sizable part of its income. Although many came to admire the scenery (most spectacularly memorable along the raw heights and long silences of Big Sur), local businessmen also encouraged regular events to attract additional vacationers. Among the seasonal revels are the National Amateur Golf Tourney at Pebble Beach and sports-car jousts in the spring and fall. The jazz festival became the September lure.

Except for a small pocket of dissent, the Monterey community, therefore, actively wanted the festival from its start, regarding it as a functional extension of the leading local industry. At Newport, by contrast, the townspeople—middle as well as high society—were mostly hostile at first. Only later, when they learned how much beer a healthy teenager can really drink, did the business interests warm acquisitively to the presence of a jazz festival. Even then, the outlanders—especially the Negroes among them—were not welcome, but were suffered for their spending.

As a legitimate community project, the Monterey Festival is operated by a board composed of local business and professional men. Newport's advisory board—which was never asked for advice—had contained many internationally luminous names, but was simply a front for an attempt to bring back vaudeville. At Monterey, however, the current and active president of the festival is Mel Isenberger, business manager of the Monterey Public Schools; and included on the board of directors are doctors, merchants and cartoonist Gus Arriola (Gordo). Even the usherettes are largely selected from among local wives and daughters. All are volunteers, and their sole payment is free music.

For the festival's first year, 68 Monterey citizens put up $100 apiece in noninterest-bearing, promissory notes. Around this nucleus the rest of the budget was raised. The next year, the festival borrowed $10,000 from a bank with two local businessmen countersigning the loan. Before the fourth and most successful Monterey Festival in 1961, the annual jazz picnic was out of debt.

"Our primary object," Mel Isenberger explains, "is not to make money. If we break even, we've served the community." With part of its first profits in 1960, the festival endowed a chair in jazz at Monterey Peninsula College, and further educational grants-in-aid are being planned.

General manager Jimmy Lyons is the one full-time employee of the festival. In his mid-40s, Lyons, whose enthusiasm a decade ago helped establish the careers of Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck, is low-keyed and shrewd. It was Lyons, for example, who instituted the logical but radical practice of asking a major jazz musician to act as musical consultant to the festival. Except for the directing hand of musician Tom Gwaltney at Virginia Beach, nearly all the other jazz festivals are run by ravenous laymen.

"We didn't want this one identified as a hustler's gambit," says Lyons. "As the so-called producer, I conceive the general plan of each year's programing, talk it over with the musical consultant, and often find myself overruled. Left alone, I might tend toward flamboyance with balloon ascensions and pink elephantsÈtrucking down the aisles, but the musicians are a corrective influence. When they agree with an idea, at least I know I'm right musically. Besides, what could be more reassuring all around than to deal with musicians through musicians?"

Starting in Monterey's second year, 1959, John Lewis, the strict musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, became the festival's conscience. Lewis was consulted on all details from staging and lighting to the choice of combos. A doggedly conscientious man, Lewis sometimes flew to California from gigs all over the country at his own expense to confer with Lyons; and once the festival itself began each year, Lewis was in relentless command. In 1960, an astonished Count Basie found Lewis' imperious forefinger leveled at him as the bearded disciplinarian said heatedly: "You know you're supposed to hit at 8:30. There's no excuse for being late." Lewis soon reprimanded another performer who had become somewhat lax in her presentation. He pointed out icily: "You've been in show business for a long time—long enough to know better."

For all the imminent danger of an Emersonian lecture by Lewis, the musicians had particular respect for Monterey because they knew it was primarily a musical event, not a sideshow.

In 1961, John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet were booked in London, and, as a result, composer Gunther Schuller and J. J. Johnson acted as associate musical consultants. Schuller, who is as compulsively reliable as Lewis but somewhat less of a martinet, supervised the rehearsals and, along with Johnson, made suggestions about programing. After the opening-night concert last September, Jimmy Lyons, Ralph Gleason and the associate musical consultants phoned and awakened Lewis in London to assure him that the festival was proceeding according to his standards. The concept of any other festival promoter paying for a transatlantic telephone call simply to tell a musician he is not being betrayed is as close to fantasy as the idea of having given a musician a voice in policy in the first place.

Monterey's concern for musicians sometimes borders on the sentimentally irrational. Last year, George Shearing played a dreary set and lacked the grace to realize he was going on much too long. Through a mistake backstage, he was finally cut off rather abruptly. Lyons didn't hear about the incident until Shearing had left. Appalled at the possibility that Shearing's feelings may have been bruised, Lyons began to call hotels in San Francisco in an attempt to locate that hypersensitive artisan. On the third try, Lyons found his man and apologized for any psychic injury Shearing might have suffered.

From the first year on, Monterey demonstrated its respect for musicians in a more durable way by commissioning new works each year. Practically all the other festivals have been a hurried omnibus of poll-winning combos performing their current "hits." Some of this jazz jukeboxing also goes on at Monterey in the evening concerts, though at a reduced tempo and with fewer groups. Lyons and his colleagues, however, felt that somewhere in the festival there had to be new challenges for both the listeners and the musicians. When other festivals have occasionally tried "serious" afternoons of portentous panel discussions or lecture-demonstrations, attendance has been scant. The Monterey afternoons, by contrast, have been encouragingly supported with almost 6000 present to hear the world premiere of J. J. Johnson's Perceptions in 1961. Wisely, the festival also began last year to admit college and high school students to the afternoon concerts at the special rate of a dollar. The regular prices of admission have been $3.50 and $2.75.

This year, for the first time, new compositions have also been included in the evening concerts. Encouraged by the afternoon attendance in previous years, Jimmy Lyons and John Lewis no longer feel it necessary to play it safe at night. Accordingly, the world premiere of Lalo Schifrin's New Continent (a divertimento for jazz trumpet and orchestra) was scheduled for opening night, September 21. This 35-minute work, commissioned by the festival, was to feature Dizzy Gillespie leading a 25-piece orchestra. And on the final night, September 23, another world premiere was set—Dave Brubeck's musical, The Real Ambassadors, with Brubeck's quartet, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Carmen McRae.

In addition to the commissions—which have previously included Duke Ellington's Suite Thursday and Jon Hendricks' Evolution of the Blues Song—the festival also realized that it was essential to provide enough rehearsal time so that new and other ambitious works could be properly prepared. For the three long brass compositions during Dizzy Gillespie's afternoon last year, Monterey paid for more than 23 hours of rehearsals. The rehearsal hall was a home economics building on the fairgrounds. Among the more singular rehearsal scenes was Dizzy Gillespie trying to transform four classical French horn players into quick approximations of jazzmen. He sang their parts to them to communicate some idea of the non-classical phrasing required, and also added a graphic illustration of body motion to underscore his points. Inspired but somewhat intimidated by the maestro, the four French horn players later went off by themselves to woodshed. They had been imbued with the Monterey ethos.

Having set the festival's musical direction, the board of directors also had to develop ways to avoid the kind of Visigoth invasion that had nearly sacked Newport, French Lick and a few other festival sites. First of all, a smoothly operating Monterey Peninsula Chamber of Commerce set up a service that assured all visitors a room. Unlike Newport, Monterey has ample housing facilities because of the profusion of motels in the area.

There was no need to camp on the beach, and, in any case, fertility rites en plein air were not allowed by the vigilant local constabulary. The Monterey police, unlike the initially malleable cops at Newport, are firmly directed by Police Chief Charles Simpson. Aside from being able to play Scrabble in five languages, Simpson is rather rare in his profession in that he is an intellecutal and is drawn to police work as a social science rather than primarily as a source of income. (Simpson has private means.) In 1960, a reporter, noticing Simpson in an intense discussion with Gunther Schuller on the lawn at the fairgrounds, walked over and instead of eavesdropping on a volley of complaints concerning jazzmen and their camp followers, he heard Simpson talking earnestly of Pierre Boulez, Edgar Varèse, Milton Babbitt, and other experimental classical composers.

The chief, judging by his head-shaking zest during Duke Ellington's performance last year, is also attuned to jazz. At the afternoon sessions, his usual post is in the top row of the bleachers near the entrance. On one Sunday afternoon, Jimmy Lyons halted his introduction to a brass piece, heard a doleful message from backstage, and announced that a trumpet player was still lost in traffic. The chief bawled out through his megaphone: "It's OK. He just got here!" A cop who doubles as an assistant production manager is as much a collector's item as a musician dedicating a number to a cop's wife on her birthday, as Dizzy Gillespie did one evening to Mrs. Simpson.

Chief Simpson, furthermore, is not as alarmed as most peace officers at the prospect of having to deal with such disaffiliated members of our society as the motley representatives of the varyingly beat generations. "We don't have any trouble," Simpson says, "we just communicate with each other. They're not wild. Some of them are just scared."

Whether wearing the insignia of beatdom or just on hand for a few days away from work, visitors to the festival, it should be noted, have considerable scope for extramusical diversions. Some explore the limited but occasionally provocative night life of Monterey, most notably last summer by jamming into a bristling flamenco room on what was once the Cannery Row of John Steinbeck's younger and more vivid years. There are always parties, ranging from the overstuffed gatherings hosted by local community leaders to more private ventures at which many of the musicians turn up.

During the concerts, couples who weary of a close, analytic approach to the music and prefer to engage in more tactile pleasures, analyze each other at ease on the grass outside the playing field. Those with a penchant for solitude drive a few miles into the astonishingly prehistoric-looking territory of Big Sur where the huge, jagged rocks provide a seascape that can quickly convince lovers they are the only survivors of the race and can do as they will. After several hours of wandering around Big Sur, it is difficult to return, even for Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington.

For those who do come back, an essential difference between Monterey and all the other festivals in terms of riot potential is that the grounds are large enough to hold many more than come for relatively serious listening. With plenty of space for everyone, there are no rumbling knots of sans-culottes at the entrance or aimlessly energetic marauders prowling about the town.

A minor but pervasive irritant at all jazz festivals are the predatory photographers who make their counterparts in La Dolce Vita appear inhibited. At Monterey, however, the American paperazzi are somewhat curbed. No flash work is allowed, a blessing to the performers, and the photographers are limited to a stretch of ground between the box seats and the stage.

With the photographers more or less in check, the Monterey planners also solved another problem seldom fully conquered elsewhere—the sound system. At Monterey the sound is in extraordinarily realistic balance, the result of the fanatic efficiency of Jim Meagher, a local electronics expert, who asks every leader in advance of the festival for a floor plan of his group's normal deployment. Meagher also buys and studies recordings of each unit hired, and mathematically works out their placement in relationship to the microphones.

Even when the sound system has been bearable, most other festivals have erred in hiring disc jockeys as masters-of-ceremonies, particularly at Randalls Island. For two years at Monterey, introductions were handled in swinging verse by the Lambert-Hendricks-Ross trio. In 1961, the toastmaster for all the concerts but one was Duke Ellington.

Admittedly, Ellington can be treacly. ("I've never seen a happier sun, and why shouldn't it be—kissing so many beautiful people?") He does, however, project the assurance that comes of genuine accomplishment, and he is capable of gently putting on his public. ("You're such a hip audience that I don't have to tell you not to snap your fingers on the beat. It's considered aggressive. Just let it fall.") Ellington, moreover, often filled in stage waits on the piano, a resource possessed by no disc jockey.

In a further departure from the customary lack of cohesion at jazz festivals, Monterey's programing was focused in large part on two of the key figures in jazz—Ellington and Gillespie. In addition to his between-the-acts role, Ellington and his orchestra were given an entire Saturday afternoon as well as two sets on the festival's final night. The afternoon was billed as Ellington Carte Blanche, and the implied expectation was that Duke would fill his day of freedom with new wonders of unprecedented scope. As could have been predicted, however, Ellington did his usual turn. Monterey had asked for too much.

The use of Dizzy Gillespie in an illuminating range of contexts worked out particularly well. On opening night, Dizzy was heard with swing-era veterans Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, Stuff Smith, Lawrence Brown and others, in a set that ignited him into a euphoria that lasted throughout the festival. It had been a disorganized session of insufficÈent planning, but Gillespie glowed at having been in company with what he considered jazz royalty.

"Playing with those guys really set me up,"Dizzy exulted at the bar."Listen to what I'm going to do from now on!I love those mothers. Man,I was playing with kings out there."

The next night, Dizzy with his own combo explored various sources and mutations of jazz from Africa to the West Indies to Latin America. Having proved his flexibility as a soloist and small-band leader, Dizzy performed brilliantly and with formidable stamina in three long pieces for himself and brass orchestra at the final afternoon concert.

Dizzy, in fact, was the dominant personality at Monterey last year. For the Sunday concert of "serious" jazz, Dizzy appeared onstage wearing a black and white Nigerian gown, a beaded North African cap, and Yugoslavian leather shoes with turned-up tips formerly indigenous to the footwear of gnomes and similar free-lancers. Characteristically, Dizzy's introductions were also less than orthodox. In recognition of France's reluctance at the time to withdraw from its bases in Morocco, Dizzy changed A Night in Tunisia to A Night Out of Bizerte.("We changed the title because America didn't vote in the UN to get the French out of there. This is our vote.") The night before, in describing an original number with African sources, Dizzy said: "We hope this will make some of you feel at home. But if it doesn't, you'd better get used to it, because we're fixing to take over the world." His smile was markedly brighter than usual.

As a whole, the festival was substantial musically although there were mistakes in programing. Besides the best of Ellington and nearly all of Gillespie, there were climaxes by John Coltrane and his drummer, Elvin Jones; the incisive Carmen McRae; and the perennially penetrating blues shouter, Jimmy Rushing. George Shearing, Odetta and the Dave Brubeck Quartet were also in attendance.

There was certainly more worth listening to at Monterey than at any other jazz festival in the past year except the reformed Newport event of 1962, and there were comfortable places in which to escape the less compelling music. The musicians at Monterey were clearly having a better time than even the most sanguine among them have come to expect from the summer circuit. Several times, for example, the usually expressionless Johnny Hodges broke into an appreciative smile on the stand. As Ellington experts can attest, the sight of Hodges expressing visible pleasure in public is as rare as Ellington forgetting to assure his audience that he does indeed love them madly.

Financially as well as esthetically, Monterey appears to have the healthiest prognosis of all American jazz festivals. Last year it attracted 27,950 people with a gross of $101,000, a new Monterey record. Jimmy Lyons and his associates intend to continue in the tradition they've established with musicians having a say in policy and being, in fact, the ultimate judges of the festival's worth. Monterey's only major soft spots now are its lack of interest in regional groups and in relative unknowns.

The future of the other attempts to create American Salzburgs on a jazz base is much less secure than Monterey's. Although the New York Daily News has had box-office success from 1960 on with a "festival" held in the hugely impersonal Madison Square Garden, it appears likely that those jazz events which can be accurately termed festivals will no longer take root in massive indoor auditoriums nor in such equally forbidding concrete shells as Freebody Park in Newport and Randalls Island in New York.

So far, in fact, the only jazz festival to have functioned efficiently and with some warmth in a large auditorium was the first and only Playboy festival in 1959 at the Chicago Stadium. Although there were too many acts, the production standards were high. A turn table stage made for visibility from any seat; the sound system was superior; there were no long stage waits and a band was in reÈerve to play for whatever intermissions were inevitable. As at Monterey, the producers also allowed and paid for reasonable rehearsal time. The turntable stage, it should be noted, can be hazardous. The News employs two of them but they're poorly synchronized with the microphones so that, at times, a listener in the maw of Madison Square Garden has the decidedly uncomfortable feeling of watching a distraught merry-go-round with a stuttering stereo set having been substituted for the calliope.

Aside from Monterey, those festivals—indoor or out—which will continue to flourish will be those like Virginia Beach's where the programs take place in informal surroundings, are not overcrowded, and are freshened by local and as yet unrenowned talent. The original Newport genre of supermarket festival is already close to extinction, and there are few prospects of its being revived in that form. Even George Wein, who, as musical director of the Newport saturnalia, became expert in how not to produce a jazz festival, proclaimed with belated righteousness: "The only way I would go back [to Newport] is if an entirely new concept of Newport as a festival center could be developed ... if it removes itself from the 'big business' approach to jazz ... if the programs are developed on artistic content and not on name draw." When he regained control of the Newport Festival this year, Wein did begin to fulfill his pledge, scheduling fewer units, omitting ringers, and commissioning a couple of new compositions.

"Running a real jazz festival isn't that hard," Gunther Schuller, relaxing between rehearsals, explained to a former war correspondent at the old Newport rites who had been sent to Monterey for rehabilitation. "You put it on in an atmosphere that people can respect and in which they can enjoy themselves at their own pace. It's that simple."

"And," Dizzy Gillespie raised his glass high, "you don't annoy the musicians."