For the first time since he founded the Newport Jazz Festival, George Wein didn't have to sign whatsoever checks or worry around how the fickle weather might affect the bottom line. Instead, his biggest concern at the late festival was whether he could maintain up on piano with his Newport All-Stars band during their set on the main stage that preceded performances by Herbie Hancock and Sonny Rollins.
But though the 82-year-old Wein sold his festival production company last-place year, he is silent very much a strength in producing jazz events, not only working to preserve the Newport festival's legacy only even starting a new concert series at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall in memory of Joyce Wein, his wife and stage business partner for nearly half a century.
"I have no problem on the job. ... As long as I can breathe, I will be involved with Newport because that to me is the holy grail of malarkey festivals," said Wein, interviewed behind the main stage at Fort Adams State Park during last month's festival. "The image of Newport relates so strongly to what I've created all these years that I will never let that go. ...
"There's one burden that I have been relieved with greatly. ... I don't pick up the losses, I don't worry about profits. So I enjoy the fete for what it is," said Wein, sporting a madras patchwork quilt cap and speaking with a classifiable Boston accent.
Wein, a jazz pianist-turned-impresario, was running Boston's Storyville idle words club, when Newport socialite Elaine Lorillard walked in one night and invited him to present some jazz to liven up the summer social season. Wein complete up putt the affluent Rhode Island seaside ithiel Town on the popular cultural map by organizing what would be the world's first outdoor jazz festival in 1954 with such luminaries as Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald.
Wein would go on to create such former landmark cultural events as the Newport Folk Festival, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and the Playboy Jazz Festival, eventually establishing his have company Festival Productions Inc. that produced jazz events around the world.
But final year, Wein decided to sell his company, while staying on with the new owners, the Festival Network LLC, focusing his attention on the deuce festivals he feels closest to - Newport and the JVC Jazz Festival New York - an event he created under different sponsorship in 1972, a year after gate-crashing rioters forced the Newport festival to be canceled until its return in 1982.
Wein has already started booking adjacent year's festivals, working with their new artistic director Jason Olaine, Festival Network's vice chief Executive for programming.
"I think of George as a prof because he's got facts and figures and all the historic knowledge in his brain," said the 40-year-old Olaine, who antecedently worked as the aesthetic director at Yoshi's jazz club in San Francisco and as a producer at Verve Records. "He's been here since the beginning so he knows what ... artists the audiences are looking at for. .... When George wants someone, they're in. I think it's my character as the new artistic director to shake things up a little bit ... but not stray likewise far away from a formula that's been working."
When Olaine had one last slot to fill for Sunday's closing concert, he asked Wein to perform with his Newport All-Stars - a festival tradition dating back to the '50s. Olaine insisted that the festival's founder perform on the main Newport stage rather than unitary of the two smaller stages.
Wein's sooner Newport All-Stars bands had featured musicians who were more his contemporaries and comfortable with the pre-1950s swing fashion he grew up playing. But at Newport, his All-Stars lineup featured 2 up-and-coming jazz stars - bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding, the youngest member at 23, and Israeli clarinetist-saxophonist Anat Cohen - as well as two distinguished veterans, the various guitarist Howard Alden and drummer Jimmy Cobb, the last surviving musician from Miles Davis' 1959 "Kind of Blue" album.
"I enjoy a festival but there's still naught like acting with musicians that you develop a family relationship," said Wein. "I got to maintain on my toes to play with these kids because they want to wail when they go up at that place. ... and believe me it's a challenge."
Wein now is putting together a different Newport All-Stars band for a Nov. 4-9 booking at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola at Jazz at Lincoln Center that will feature a vet front-line with tenor saxophonist-flutist Lew Tabackin and trumpeter Randy Sandke.
Wein realized early on that he'd never be the greatest jazz pianist afterward hearing Art Tatum, only he ascertained his true calling as an impresario while still a college student in 1949 when his bandleader, clarinetist Edmond Hall, asked him to negotiate a raise with a reluctant Boston club owner and he complete up producing concerts himself.
Wein hasn't lost his warmth for producing. In September 2007, he organized an all-star benefit concert at Boston's Symphony Hall with Herbie Hancock, Branford Marsalis. Roy Haynes, Joe Lovano and other jazz stars to found a scholarship fund for promising young jazz musicians at the Berklee College of Music named afterward his wife who died of cancer in 2005.
Wein recently proclaimed that he will be producing a concert series in pureness of his wife, which he hopes will get an annual event on the Carnegie Hall calendar.
"I wanted to do that because some people intellection when I sold my company that I'm not active, but I'm just as active both with my company and on my own," Wein said.
The three concerts for the 2008-9 season will feature the Dominican-born pianist Michel Camilo wHO melds jazz with Afro-Cuban rhythms (Nov. 13);
George Michael feels real good with Dita Von Teese by his side.
