“Historic Sounds of Newport, Newly Online”

NY TIMES
November 10, 2009
By BEN RATLIFF

As the future of the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals continues to unfold, its recorded past has suddenly been thrown open.

Recently the festivals themselves almost disappeared, amid the financial collapse of their producing company, the Festival Network LLC. They returned last summer in a new guise, at their usual site, once George Wein, the founder of both festivals, regained the right to hold music events there.

It’s a complicated story. But if you want to know why the Newport Jazz Festival has been so important to American music, it’s easy: you just have to hear the recorded evidence. Bits and pieces have emerged over the years, in live recordings by Ellington, Coltrane and others. Now Wolfgang’s Vault, the online concert-recording archive, intends to fill in the gaps.

The company, based in San Francisco, bought the archives of the Newport festivals from the Festival Network last year. Bill Sagan, founder and chief executive of Wolfgang’s Vault, says the archives include many, many tapes: 1,000 to 1,200 individual performances, dating at least to 1955, the festival’s second year, and continuing to the end of the century. It is not a complete audio record — certain years contain only a small number of performances, or are missing completely — but it is a major one nonetheless.

Since the purchase, Wolfgang’s Vault has spent almost $5 million, Mr. Sagan said, on making audio transfers and mixes of the tapes. (Neither Mr. Sagan nor Chris Shields of the Festival Network would reveal the amount spent on acquiring the archive itself.) On Wednesday the company will begin posting free streams of a handful of performances from the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival, at wolfgangsvault.com: the first offerings include Count Basie, Dakota Staton and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. By next Tuesday, when more are added, there will be 27 sets from that year’s jazz festival, including some by Ahmad Jamal, Joe Williams, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver. The plan is to have hundreds more online in the coming months, from other years of Newport Jazz and from the Newport Folk Festival as well.  Full Article...