Newport Jazz Festival, 1960:The Year They Called the National Guard

You won’t catch me hating on the Newport Jazz Festival, of course! When I was a teenager, the festival on Rhode Island had a kind of magical aura of importance: on PBS I’d seen footage of Gil Evans playing there with Art Farmer: … and listened time and again to John Coltrane and Archie Shepp’s New Thing at Newport: … and Dizzy Gillespie’s big band recording At Newport: … dozens and dozens of times. (Seriously, in high school, I was baffled by how everyone was into music we all knew nobody would be listening to by 2002. My jam was Dizzy’s …

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