I never considered that it’s just a festival, a series of concerts. We considered ourselves more than just festival organisers because on the other side we provide people hope. Edin Zubcevic, Sarajevo Jazz Festival director
I really think that a festival is no good if it’s just a bunch of gigs that you could have heard anywhere…. [T]he idea [is] to present what doesn’t happen. Nod Knowles, UK festival director
There is something quite remarkable across Europe about the contribution of promoters, producers, musicians and jazz enthusiasts to the development of jazz festival culture. and which we can identify via a brief consideration of the pivotal US jazz festival, at Newport, Rhode Island.
The inaugural Newport Jazz Festival, held in July 1954, was actually advertised as the ‘first annual American jazz festival’—and in that sense of ‘first … American’ festival rests an acknowledgement that the term jazz festival, and the very idea of an event such as a festival of jazz music, had already been invented elsewhere.
This was made clear to the restless crowd in the opening speeches at Newport that first night (the start of the live music was already running one hour late. Organisers and musicians alike were learning how to do a festival).
The master of ceremonies was big band leader Stan Kenton (Duke Ellington wasn’t available), who was reading, and sometimes diverting, from a script written by Downbeat contributor Nat Hentoff. Kenton talked about the history and evolution of jazz in the US, and then turned to the subject of the new kind of event everyone had come to Newport to be at, saying:
This country has taken jazz for granted. Europe has recently held several jazz festivals, for abroad they recognise jazz as a distinct form of music. But only recently has this country accepted it as such. The Newport Festival is the first [jazz festival] to be held in this country and tonight makes history.
Impressively, Newport has gone on in the decades since to make a good deal more musical history. Yet prior history had already been made, as Kenton and Hentoff had informed their new festival audience, and it happened across the Atlantic: ‘Europe has recently held several jazz festivals’.
So: can we say that the jazz festival was born in Europe? The jazz festival, which is today a near ubiquitous form of seasonal musical gathering and celebration, with common practices and features, networks, infrastructures, people and opportunities, took off in and echoed around Europe, and its burgeoning popularity was recognised and then swiftly imitated in the US. Among any other claims of jazz innovation Europe may feel it can make, this one may be worth sticking with.
This is not an argument made for the purpose of cultural chauvinism—rather it is one presented to encourage us to think further about the complexities of innovation, transmission and circulation of live jazz music in the transatlantic frame.
Nice Jazz Festival is confident of its place in jazz history. The festival website’s History page opens with this grand statement (in English):
1948, the first jazz festival in the world. Well, yes, it was in Nice and not in America that the first jazz festival in the world was born.
The festival publicity and logo carries the strap line ‘depuis 1948.’ Earlier tournois, carnivals or cavalcades of mass music-making may have sounded or looked like versions of what would become recognisable as a jazz festival, but it was indeed Nice that termed its event a ‘Festival du Jazz.’
Further, it was a ‘Festival International du Jazz’, featuring an impressive bill including Django Reinhardt and headliner Louis Armstrong.
That the early jazz festival was innovated and developed in Europe is striking—from the late 1940s on, that is, the very early postwar years in a devastated continent, the organisation and advertising of the new cultural event of the festival of jazz music began to take place. At the jazz band festival ball there was felt to be a good new buzz, and there was a collective spirit, and the idea spread quickly through the 1950s, and would go on to influence also the innovative rock and pop festivals and mass musical gatherings of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture.
In the space of only half-a-dozen years the jazz festival spread, from, notably, Nice (1948) to Paris (1948 and 1949) and on to the Belgian coast (also 1948), to London (1949) to Newport by 1954. Following that, the journey behind the Iron Curtain took only a couple of further years (Sopot, Poland in 1956). Of these earliest festivals, we can reasonably say that Nice and Newport are the most notable, because of their extraordinary longevity. Nice and Newport have been with us most years, on and off, here and there, for many decades….
So, after 70 or 80 years what more is there to this thing we call the jazz festival? Beyond its role in tourism, urban regeneration, economic impact, social inclusion agendas, repetition year on year? Surely there is more, or why do we still go, why do we remain interested, hopeful? To answer these questions, and to conclude, we can I feel do worse than reflect on the wise words of the African American civil rights activist Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
These are taken from his opening remarks for the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival, addressing European festival-goers and drawing on American civil rights to present an understanding both of jazz music and of the special gathering of the jazz festival itself. In my view these are resonant and important words. ‘Jazz,’ King wrote in the Berlin festival programme,
speaks of life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties,… [and m]odern jazz has continued this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence….
And now [this is 60 years ago, remember], Jazz is exported to the world…. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy.…
In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.