(Reprinted from the October 2020 issue of Downbeat magazine)
Fort Adams State Park— the Newport Jazz Festival’s traditional home—was uncharacteristically quiet the first week of August this year.
Across the harbor from the park, sailboats rocked gently in the Newport, Rhode Island, marina and remained locked up tight. In town, only a few masked folks strolled the sidewalks. And at the shuttered Newport Visitors Center, a notice taped inside the door explained how to claim festival-ticket refunds
In a normal year, the jazz fest and its attendant Newport Folk Festival draw approximately 10,000 music tourists each day over two weekends to the small Rhode Island city, a resort town of fewer than 25,000 year-round residents. The money that these tourists spend not only keeps the festivals solvent, but sustains local enterprises—restaurants, hotels, shops.
“It’s crazy to see the town like this. Usually, it’s packed at this time,” said Stella Melchione, a ticket sales agent at Newport Harbor Shuttle, a boat service that ferries concert attendees back and forth from downtown Newport to Fort Adams. “[The festival cancellation] has taken a big toll on the business overall.”
She and her coworker, N
atalie Conover, noted that during a typical festival period, the service makes constant runs throughout the day and into the evening, filling five to eight boats to capacity for each run. But “we can’t even fill [the ferries] to half capacity this summer,” Conover said.
Jay Sweet, executive producer of both the Newport music festivals, held off cancelling the famed jazz fest until April 29, the day that Gov. Gina Raimondo announced a statewide prohibition on large events for the summer in response to the coronavirus outbreak. The jazz fest and its roots-music counterpart fell under that mandate. The two festivals are typically a week apart; this year the folk festival was scheduled for Jul. 30-Aug. 2, followed by the jazz festival on Aug. 7-9.
“We had a good indication that the cancellation was going to happen,” Sweet told DownBeat. “But we couldn’t officially declare the cancellation if we’d wanted to. The governor of Rhode Island had to be the one to officially declare it, because [the festivals are held] in a state park.”
Within hours of the announcement, Sweet and his team had issued a press release explaining the news to fans, musicians and the locals who depend on tourism for their livelihoods.
“The local economy lost $58 million because of the cancellation,” Sweet said. “When you take $58 million out of a local economy, even a robust economy like Newport, it has a huge economic impact. The festivals are the biggest weekends in Newport by far.”
Further along the Newport marina, The Lobster Bar, a family-style restaurant, also was catering to far fewer customers this summer than during past years. Among those who do turn out, emotions can run high, said general manager Craig Kilroy—from gratitude at being able to dine out again to anger at ongoing mask requirements.
“It’s been a weird summer,” he said. “Not having the festivals is definitely hitting us. We miss them.”
But no concern was harder hit than the Newport Festivals Foundation, the Massachusetts-based nonprofit that’s managed the festivals since 2011.
“More than 70 percent of our funding comes from the festivals and their auxiliary income, like merchandise, parking, food and beverage, and sponsorship,” said Sweet, who’s been producing the jazz festival since 2016 and the folk festival since 2009. “Without the events, none of that money comes in. This is a real crisis [for us].”
In normal years, event cancellation insurance would help to deflect the blow from such a crisis. This year, however, the annual insurance policies on offer to events sponsors contained a regrettable omission.
“Right before we were able to buy our insurance this year, the insurance companies added a COVID-19 carve-out clause to their pandemic coverage,” Sweet said. “There’d already been a breakout in China, and a couple of events there had been cancelled due to it, and they immediately [changed their] cancellation policies. So, we had absolutely zero [insurance] help after cancelling the events.”
Undaunted, Sweet vowed to deliver something to fans on the scheduled jazz festival weekend, and within 12 hours of the governor’s statement, the infrastructure for a virtual Newport Jazz Festival was being planned.
“The day we officially cancelled is the day we officially began [preparing for the Revival Weekend],” he said. “My staff and I got together and started white-boarding potential ways we could do something.”
The Revival Weekend—an exemplary display of virtual music programming—came together quickly. First, as a lead-up to the weekend, the foundation’s artistic director, bassist Christian McBride, partnered with NPR Music and WBGO‘s Jazz Night in America to air a three-part radio retrospective of past Newport Jazz Festivals on Fridays that preceded the weekend.
For the weekend itself, the bassist pulled even more enticing programming from the festival archives—some of jazz history’s most iconic Newport performances by John Coltrane, Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan and Thelonious Monk, among others. WBGO rebroadcast the artists’ full sets back-to-back for eight hours straight on both Aug. 8 and 9.
Then, as a stand-in for its annual fundraiser, typically held on the Saturday evening of the jazz festival, the foundation live-streamed its Music, Magic & Memories gala for invited donors; the event’s centerpiece was a virtual performance with McBride, Wynton Marsalis and Diana Krall, created especially for the evening, with an inspiring, forward-looking message about the festival from Wein, now in his mid-90s.
Finally, on Sunday, McBride closed out the Revival Weekend with Jazz Together, a Facebook Live discussion with a “whole crew of jazz royalty,” as he put it in the introduction. In an hour and a half, he swapped insights and anecdotes with almost a dozen festival veterans, each speaking in turn from their pandemic shelters.
In the surprisingly intimate interviews, jazz celebrities like Diana Krall, Kamasi Washington, Nicholas Payton, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Ben Williams spoke warmly of their festival experiences—their first time on the stage, the musicians they played with, their interactions with co-founder Wein.
Speaking last, DIVA Orchestra founder Sherrie Maricle summed up why Newport Jazz is such a meaningful gig to her and her peers. “It’s the most revered stage that any jazz player can be on—it’s the jazz mecca,” she told McBride. “The goosebumps that arise…”
Musicians like these, whose careers had been so suddenly upended by the pandemic, stood at the forefront of Sweet’s concerns. As early as March, he said, it had become clear that some of the artists who play the festivals each year were facing trouble.
“Before we even knew that we were going to cancel, we had an artist reach out to say that they didn’t think they’d be able to play the festival this year,” he recalled. “At that point, we still thought that all would be back to normal by the end of the summer. When I asked why, they said that they were worried about just staying afloat, that soon they’d have to go on food stamps.”
In response to stories like these, on March 30 Sweet announced the formation of the Newport Festivals Musicians Relief Fund, a pool of money from which the foundation would issue grants of $300 to $1,500, depending on need, to any musician who’s ever played the festival during its 65-year history. To fund these grants, the foundation repurposed money previously allocated to the Newport Jazz Festival’s music education program; most music education programs that the Foundation supports had been cancelled anyway, Sweet said.
“We burned through that initial budget within a week,” he went on, adding that further donations have helped to replenish the fund. To date, the program’s given financial support to about 400 artists and distributed around $200,000 in grant money.
Sweet also invited each musician booked for this year’s festival to return next year. “So far, everyone has committed to coming back in 2021,” he said.
The festival producer added that funding for the 2021 festival seemed to be on track. But what this year’s cancellation portends for the music industry—especially for small, independent promoters—is troubling.
“The difficulty is that the tap has run dry,” Sweet asserted. “If Congress doesn’t pass a relief package, there is nothing on the horizon to save musicians from massive economic insolvency.”
Sweet proposed that the Save Our Stages Act and the Restart Act, two pieces of legislation pending in Congress, would help small performing arts organizations—and the musicians they employ—to remain in operation. Often in competition with two global music promoters, Live Nation Entertainment and AEG Worldwide, these important smaller players in the live music business are struggling to survive during the current crisis.
If the crisis continues much longer, “there’ll be almost no competition left for those two entities,” Sweet predicted, going on to claim that within “the next three to four months, 90 percent of all live independent music venues could be gone.”
Amid all of these financial and legislative concerns, Sweet also harbored personal regret about the festival’s cancellation: “To miss out on doing a festival for George this year—that’s actually one of the hardest parts about this. We don’t know how many more he’ll get to see.”
But in the March press release, Sweet had invoked the Rhode Island state motto—“Hope”—as a watchword for this moment in the festival’s history.
“Hope is what music gives to people,” he said. “Without music, what we’re going through now would be that much harder. From the 10,000-foot view, that’s our mission now.”
Photo: Corwin Wickersham/Newport Jazz Festival