Youth and adventurousness were well served at the 2010 Newport Jazz Festival. Age and experience, not so much.
Which is fine with me. Which is as it should be. And which helped make for an amazingly good festival.
It’s obviously getting harder and harder for the festival to book the kind of household-name jazz stars who were once its bread and butter, for the simple reason that as time goes on there are fewer and fewer of them around. And most of the big names who are still alive and active and capable of selling a lot of tickets, even the ones that are thought of as still in their prime, are eligible for Social Security. (Herbie Hancock, one of the stars of this year’s festival — I caught only the tail end of his set, including a disappointingly by-the-numbers “Chameleon” — is 70. His fellow keyboardist Chick Corea, who led a remarkable all-acoustic, all-star quartet with Kenny Garrett on sax, Christian McBride on bass and Roy Haynes on drums, is 69.)
