New England

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.)
 

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Last year’s Newport Folk Festival was an occasion of high drama, sweet nostalgia and deep emotion. This year’s was mostly just a lot of really good music.
 
Things were extraordinary last year for two reasons. The first is that it was the 50th anniversary of the first Newport Folk Festival, an occasion that George Wein and his staff marked by bringing back as many big-name veterans as possible, most notably Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. The second is that the festival almost didn’t happen: first the company that had taken over Wein’s Festival Productions lost its license to use Fort Adams State Park, then it (apparently) went belly-up. The festival was saved only when Wein, the man who made it happen in the first place back in 1959, stepped into the breach to secure the license and, on relatively short notice, put a remarkable all-star bash together.
 

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Elvis Perkins in Dearland joins the lineup for this weekend's Newport Folk Festival, replacing Justin Townes Earle who injured his hand in an accident. In a bit of serendipity, Perkins called the festival office seeking tickets to attend the festival just after promoters got work of Earle's withdrawal. According to the festival, "We said we could do one better...and asked them if they would like to play, and they said 'yes'." Perkins and his band have played two other recent Newports, including last year. The band plays Sunday at 4:50 on the Quad stage.

From the zydeco of the Balfa Brothers to the Dixieland of Dirty Dozen Brass Band, George Wein’s Newport Folk Festival has a history of presenting the sounds of New Orleans at his seminal festival in New England. Of course, Wein also was responsible for the launching of New Orleans’ signature Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Wein’s guide to the music and culture of New Orleans was musicologist Allan Jaffe, and in one of the earliest Newport Folk Festivals, Jaffe’s newly formed ensemble Preservation Hall Jazz Band graced the Newport stage.

This year, Preservation Hall is back in a leading role, holding down a Sunday mid-afternoon slot on the Harbor Stage that is likely to include numerous guest appearances by other festival performers who appeared on the group’s acclaimed collaboration album, Preservation, released earlier this year.

“It’s fantastic to have The Preservation Hall Jazz Band at the Newport Folk Festival again,” said Wein. “The band is very much a part of life in New Orleans and it reflects, not only what the city is all about, but what music is all about.”

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