Newport Jazz Festival/Cliff Manor Jazz Festival
Festival
1969-07-04
Cliff Walk Manor Hotel
Fifteenth Annual Festival. The afternoon of Friday, July 4, 1969 at the Newport Jazz Festival had the ominous, stifling atmosphere on the day of the 1960 riot in Newport, when the town was choking with cars loaded with boozy teenagers who blocked the narrow street and sidewalks and parks; by the evening, ten thousand strong and full of beer and courage, they stormed the already-packed Freebody Park where the Festival was held, and it took the police, fending off rocks and beer cans and finally resorting to tear gas, a couple off hours to send them packing. The boomerang results, reported Whitney Balliett, was that the Festival was shut down and did not reopen for two years.
The aftermath of the Newport Jazz Festival in 1969 suddenly took on the same teeming, hothouse atmosphere as the festival. Very different from their 1960 predecessors, almost every road flanked by struggling Indian-files of kids carrying packs; their hair is long and tangled, their clothes are de rigueur freakish. By the time the evening concert began, the situation around the festival grounds was claustrophobic. Kids far as the eye could see.
Like the 1960 festival, posters on trees and fences announcing that Mingus and the trumpeteer Lee Morgan would hold an "underground" jazz festival on Friday and Saturday nights (July 5 and 6) in which Baby Laurence and Max Roach playing a fifteen minute brilliant duet, Baby Laurence cannonading all over the big bandstand, Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge in consummate tandem, and a thinner, wilder Mingus passing a derby hat in the audience.
Performing Arts Encyclopedia
http://www.loc.gov/performingarts
Balliett, Whitney: Collected Works : A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000. St. MartinÕs Press (2000).
Tap Dance America
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/tda/tda-home.html
tda
IHAS
151216
loc.music.tda.1155