Newport in New York

A New York City ferryboat became a Mississippi stern-wheeler for a day --tootling its way up the Hudson River to the infectious quicksteps of three Dixieland jazz bands. A ballroom at the Commodore Hotel seemed to go through a time warp to the 1930s, as kids in jeans and matrons in long gowns bobbed, swayed and shuffled to the strains of Count Basic and Sy Oliver.

Giving the cleaning ladies the night off, Radio City Music Hall opened its doors at midnight for a four-hour jam session that saw Ben Webster, Zoot Sims, and Milt Jackson tapping toes where the Rockettes usually toe-up to tap. Uptown at Yankee Stadium, the likes of Ray Charles, Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan made a far more winning team than the stadium's usual inhabitants.

So it went last week as jazz came home to the city that reared it, made it rich, sucked it dry, threw it aside --and now, in a stroke of historical irony, seems to have given it one of its biggest revitalizations ever. For nine days, some 62 all-stars and more than 500 sidemen--from Duke Ellington to Charlie Byrd, from Dizzy Gillespie to Roberta Flack, from Eddie Condon to Sonny Rollins--wailed through 30 concerts in eleven various settings (range: 300 seats to 32,000). When it was all over, more than 100,000 jazz buffs had paid a total of $500,000 to listen to a music that more than a foolish few had considered dead years ago, gone with Kid Ory, Bunny Berigan and Charlie Parker. Some, indeed, settled in for the duration, paying $122 for a ticket to all 30 events.

The event was called the Newport Jazz Festival New York. It was a massive transplant of the same Newport Festival that rotund former Jazz Pianist George Wein, 46, had run for 18 years in a large field hard by Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay. In recent years, with rock festivals failing on all sides, Newport had become a new chosen land of the Huns of Aquarius. Last year, when a noisy and violent horde broke through a chain-link fence and overran the paying customers while Dionne Warwicke was singing, Wein had enough; he canceled the show. A few days later, the Newport city fathers canceled the festival permanently. "I cried for a while," recalls Wein. "But there was nothing I could do."

Actually, as Wein soon realized, what he could do was to move down the coast a bit and make New York the Bayreuth of jazz. In Rhode Island, he says, "they were never interested in the artistic content of the festival, only how much money it would bring in. What we found out when we moved to New York was that the world was listening, if Rhode Island wasn't."

What the world was listening to reflected Wein's own solid, mainstream musical tastes. The emphasis was on established and often middle-aged jazz figures, so much so that Trumpeter Miles Davis absented himself from the week's proceedings, complaining of "comfortable" and "Uncle Tom" aspects in Wein's programming--and about the fact that he had been invited to play two concerts in one day but was only going to get one fee ($7,500), like everyone else.

Otherwise the prevailing mood was one of joyful reunion. At Philharmonic Hall, Drummer Gene Krupa and Pianist Teddy Wilson came out to play with Vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, and they went Flying Home at the same dizzying speed as in the old days of the Benny Goodman Quartet. In the same hall on another night, the Herman Herd thundered once again as Woody Herman was reunited with such stars from his 1940s bands as Stan Getz, Flip Phillips and Red Norvo. At Carnegie Hall, the legendary Benny Carter led a group accurately labeled Swing Masters, including Veterans Harry Edison, Buddy Tate, Tyree Glenn and Jo Jones.

Nor were more contemporary accents drowned out. The 30-year-old Guitarist John McLaughlin led his Mahavishnu Orchestra through a shattering set of jazz-rock at Carnegie Hall. Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard turned in a fiery performance as a stand-in for Miles Davis. And the "Connoisseur Concerts" that Wein booked into Carnegie Hall presented such acquired tastes as the abstract expressionism of Pianist Cecil Taylor. In all, there was enough youth and promise on stage --and in the audiences--to make the festival a meeting ground not only of the past and present, but of the past and future as well.

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