The Philadelphia Music Project is pleased to introduce the third in a series of articles under the banner American Impresario. The series will explore the careers and contributions of leading U.S. music curators whose creative work has profoundly influenced the field by giving listeners new ways to experience and understand music.
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George Wein at the 2010 Newport Jazz Festival (Credit: Ayano Hisa)
The third article in the American Impresario series features George Wein, pianist, founder of the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and many others. Outstanding music journalist Peter Keepnews interviewed Wein and surveys his long career and his influence on the field of jazz presenting.
"I did not set out to make history": George Wein's Career in Presenting Jazz
By Peter Keepnews
The world had never seen anything quite like the two days of jazz in the open air that George Wein presented in a seaside Rhode Island town on Independence Day weekend in 1954.
In its setting, its scope and its stylistic range, the Newport Jazz Festival established the template for a fundamentally new way of presenting the music that soon became as important as the nightclub bandstand and the concert stage. It’s hard to imagine how different the course of jazz history in the second half of the 20th century might have been if Newport had not happened.
Wein turned jazz from a music mostly associated with smoky rooms where liquor was sold to something that could be part of a family’s summer vacation plans. He created a new atmosphere for listening to jazz — almost, as both his admirers and detractors have sometimes put it, a carnival atmosphere — and in the process laid the groundwork for an empire that would spread the message of jazz all over the world.
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