George Wayne, Newport Jazz co-founder and pioneer of modern music festival, dies at 95

George Wayne, an impresario of 20th-century music who helped found Newport jazz and folk festivals and designed the blueprint for gatherings everywhere from Woodstock to the south of France, died Monday. Family spokeswoman Carolyn McClure said Wayne, 95, died “sleeping peacefully” in a New York City apartment.

A former jazz club owner and aspiring pianist, Wayne started the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954 with a lineup for Under the Rain and Heaven – Billie Holiday and Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald and Lester Young. The following year Louis Armstrong was there and Duke Ellington made history in 1956, with his band’s set featuring an extraordinary, 27-chorus solo by saxophonist Paul Gonsalves that almost single-handedly revived middle-aged Ellington’s career.

Wayne led the festival for more than 50 years and the cast would include nearly every major jazz star, from Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk to Charles Mingus and Vinton Marsalis. In just 1965, the bill included Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, John Coltrane, Ellington, Gillespie, Davis, and Monk.

The success of Newport inspired a wave of jazz festivals in America, and Wayne repeated his success around the world, with his other projects including the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the Grande Parade du Jazz in Nice, France.

His multi-day, all-star gatherings were also a model for rock festivals, including Woodstock in 1969 and the Lollapalooza tours of recent years.

Critic Jean Santoro observed in 2003 that without Wayne, “everything from Woodstock to jazz at Lincoln Center would have happened differently – if it happened at all.” Wayne “can make a reasonable claim to have invented, developed and codified contemporary popular music,” wrote Santoro.

The idea for Newport came from locals Louie and Elaine Laurrillard, who urged Wayne to organize a jazz festival in their gilded resort community in Rhode Island. One socialite, Elaine Laurrillard, complained that the summer scene was “too boring.” Her tobacco-heavy husband supported her with a donation of $20,000.

Wayne never knew about a large-scale jazz festival, so, in the spirit of the music, he improvised – attempting to combine the energy and musicality of the Harlem Jazz Club with the atmosphere of a summer classical concert at Tanglewood.

“What was a festival for me?” Wayne said later. “I had no rule book to go with. I knew it had to be something unique that no jazz fan had ever been exposed to.”

Wayne didn’t only work with jazz musicians. In 1959, he and Pete Seeger began a fellow folk festival, which would include early performances by Joan Baez and Jose Feliciano among others and track Bob Dylan’s development from earnest crisis to rule-breaking rock star.

Dylan’s show in 1963 helped establish him as the so-called “voice of his generation”, but by 1965 he felt limited by the folk community and switched to Newport with an electric band.

The response was mostly positive, but there was enough enthusiasm from the audience and the conflict – Wayne dismissing the legend that Seeger tried to cut electrical wires to Dylan’s amps – marked Dylan’s appearance as a mile in rock and folk history. to make stones.

In his memoir “Myself Among Others”, Wayne recalls confronting Dylan as he left the stage amid the commotion and applause, demanding that he return to play some acoustics.

When Dylan protested, saying he didn’t have an acoustic guitar, Wayne asked volunteers to lend him and help convince Dylan to move back out. Years later, Wayne stayed away from hearing Dylan sing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, a farewell saga in more ways than one. “It was a farewell to the idealism and sanctity of the Folk Resurrection,” Wayne wrote.

“There’s no looking back—not for Dylan, not for anybody.” Newport festivals have led to several films and concert albums, most notably Murray Lerner’s Oscar-nominated 1967 documentary “Festival!”, with Dylan, Johnny Cash and Howlin’ Wolf among the cast. Wayne would later star in Led Zeppelin, Sly and the Family, Laye Stone and James Brown and other rock and rhythm and blues stars.

Wayne himself was a pianist since childhood and has had an active music career, releasing the albums “Wayne, Women and Songs,” “Swing That Music” and many more, and making annual appearances at the Newport festival with his Newport All-Stars band. Maintained.

He was named a “Jazz Master” in 2005 by the National Endowment for the Arts and received an honorary Grammy in 2014.
Years ago, President Clinton brought his saxophone to the White House stage in celebration of the Newport Jazz Festival.

Wayne grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, his father a dentist with a gambling habit and an eye for his secretary, his mother a pianist of “passive skill” and an heir to a paper products fortune.

As a teenager, he defied his family by inviting black musicians to his home, and in his 20s he dated a black woman, Joyce Alexander, whom he married in 1959. Joyce Wayne, who became his business partner and closest advisor, died in 2005.

Wayne saw himself as merely an “average middle class, Jewish-American kid”, though easily fascinated by music.
He’ll remember attending a Benny Goodman concert and listening to trumpeter Cutie Williams just a few feet away.

“For the duration of the evening I stood alone, wide-eyed, at the foot of the stage,” he wrote in “Myself Among Others”, released in 2003, “oblivious to the sea of ​​couples swirling around the dance floor behind me.”
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Wain enlisted in the army during World War II and twice escaped possible death: Hitler died in April 1945 as Wain and others were close to the German front. Months later, when the Japanese surrendered they were transferred to the Pacific.

He graduated from Boston University and started the Storyville Jazz Club and Record Label in Boston, where Ellington, Charlie Parker and others came from. Wayne also had to make a few appearances, including playing the piano for a set for Holiday, which did not feature a regular keyboardist.

The Newport festival went on despite ongoing conflicts, whether from local objections in Newport, the dwindling appeal of jazz, or the demands and outrage of musicians.

In 1960, Mingus organized a rivalry festival to protest Wayne’s perceived favoritism among artists, and a riot at the Newport House led to Wayne being sidelined until 1962. In 1971, the booking of the Allman Brothers Band proved disastrous when rock fans took over the festival grounds, even setting sheet music on fire, and brought about a decade of exile from Newport.

Wayne, once described by Lillian Ross of The New Yorker as a stocky man who “seemed to be full of controlled frenzy,” was a fighter who confronted racist officers in New Orleans and in Newport. The monk followed for waiting too long to take the stage.

He was also good at maths. He recruited Sinatra, Dion Warwick and other popular singers to help support the jazz artists.
In the mid-1970s, he was struggling financially and became one of the first popular music promoters to work with corporate sponsors, particularly the makers of Cool Cigarettes.

In 2005, he founded his company, Festival Productions Inc. was sold to Festival Network LLC and played a more limited role in Newport.
Six years later, he founded the non-profit Newport Festival Foundation to oversee the summer events.

“I want the festival to last forever,” Wayne told the Associated Press at the time. “It’s not a business thing with me. It’s my life.”