Newport Jazz Festival

Respectability.

Jazz was traditionally a music too closely associated with sin and race to attract an establishment following. Born in southern whorehouses and bar-rooms and developed by black musicians with a reputation for intemperance and licentiousness, its pulsating rhythms and libertine melodies had the right degree of naughtiness for a young dance crowd, but most people felt it was inappropriate for the concert stage and quite likely immoral in a nightclub setting. It was therefore mildly scandalous when social scions Elaine and Louis L. Lorillard of Newport, Rhode Island, announced plans to stage the first annual Newport Jazz Festival in mid July 1954 at the seventy-five-year-old Newport Casino, an exclusive open-air club founded by Mr. Lorillard's great-grandfather Pierre, the tobacco baron.

Six Thousand Fans.

Time magazine reported that "Newport's narrow streets were thronged with loudshirted bookie...

[The entire page is 984 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass