Jazz, by George

"Jazz is a minority music and always will be. It just is not popular music." With that said, Promoter George Wein went out last week and did his best to prove himself wrong -by putting on the largest jazz festival ever staged anywhere.

Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall was crammed as Pianist Earl ("Fatha") Hines, Singer Mabel Mercer, Saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and other interpreters jazzed the songs of composers like George Gershwin and Cole Porter. Aboard the good ship Kennedy, freed for the day from its normal duties as a Staten Island ferry for a toot up the Hudson River, traditional-jazz buffs pressed shoulder to shoulder to hear Percy Humphrey's Preservation Hall Band. At the Roseland Ballroom, young and old couples danced into the wee hours as the bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Woody Herman recreated their hits of the 1930s (Sophisticated Lady, One O'Clock Jump, Woodchopper's Ball, to name three).

It was the 20th Newport Jazz Festival, transplanted to New York for the second year. The festival went on for ten days, with 1,000 middle-of-the-road, derriere-and avant-garde musicians presenting 57 concerts (many simultaneously) in 13 locations -from Carnegie Hall to the Apollo Theater in Harlem to Shea Stadium in Flushing. It cost $1,000,000, drew a total audience of some 120,000 and just broke about even with foundation and industry subsidies.

Circus Barker. Wein (pronounced Ween) presided over it all with the bold acumen of a Hurok and the bustle manner of a circus barker. At his headquarters on Manhattan's West Side, he could be found conducting two interviews at once (one by phone) and fighting off others ("I have more important things than seeing the French TV, all right?"). He alternately praised his black wife Joyce ("After I break a few heads, she puts them together") and exploded at her ("Don't bother me with things you can take care of!"). Regularly Wein would fly out to mount as many rostrums as he could get to -a moon-shaped man with a shiny bald pate, introducing acts in a light but piercing nasal voice: "Ladies and gentlemen, I think you're going to hear something you've never heard before." One thing most of them had never heard before was Wein himself playing a pleasant, Teddy Wilson-like jazz piano, which he did with the Newport Ensemble on the rainy opening day in Central Park.

Wein's lifelong passion for jazz began because of, rather than in spite of, his parents, a Boston plastic surgeon and his wife who collected records by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and other jazz pioneers. When George branched out from his classical piano studies to what he calls "party piano," his parents encouraged him. At 15 he was playing jazz in clubs like the Tic Toe in Boston and the Blue Moon in Lynn, and his parents were driving him to and from the gigs. After working as a $60-a-week sideman with Clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, Wein opened his own club in Boston's Copley Square Hotel in 1950. It was called Storyville, after the old New Orleans jazz district, and it ran successfully for ten years. In 1954 Wein organized the first of 18 annual summer jazz festivals in Newport, R.I.

Today, at 47, Wein heads a $3.5 million-a-year company, Festival Productions Inc. In addition to Newport in New York, it stages eleven U.S. jazz festivals in the spring and summer (New Orleans, Los Angeles, Cincinnati), and this fall will send top U.S. jazzmen to Europe and Japan. Wein and his wife, who is his associate producer, draw a combined annual salary of $40,000 plus expenses. Like many men with a mission in life and a balance sheet in hand, Wein can be sympathetic and jocular with people in the jazz world, as well as brash and infuriating. "A lot of people resent him," says his friend Jazz Critic Leonard Feather, "but I don't know any who hate him. Most simply envy him."

Although this year's New York show was half again as large as last year's, Wein's ideal would be something approaching the total saturation of the Edinburgh Festival, where every pub and hall in town is filled with performers. "Pick, go, do what you want," he says. "That's what a festival is."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.