CHICAGO DEFENDER

-Immediate Release-

LANGSTON HUGHES

GLOOMY DAY AT NEWPORT

The Seventh season of the Newport Jazz Festival opened happily on the evening of July 30 with Cannonball Adderley, the Newport Youth Band, modern combos and old-time stride piano players participating in the programs. On Friday night three swinging groups displayed their wares: Dizzie Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, and Louis Armstrong. Freebody Park jumped, and the festivities seemed rolling merrily on toward a whaling Fourth of July. But on Saturday night while such mighty jazzers as Ray Charles with his singers and the Horace Silver Quintet were on the stage, a riot broke out in the streets beyond the park. Oscar Peterson's car could barely get through the sticks, stones, tear gas and fire hoses in time for him to close the program at one o'clock in the morning. And that morning, Sunday, the City Council of Newport met in special session and cancelled the Jazz Festival forever. Sunday afternoon it all ended in the Blues.

But by noon that day the Council had not yet completed its deliberations. At the Park an audience had begun to gather. So the afternoon program was permitted to go on. It happened as follows:

the program that I had helped to plan, assemble, and which I narrated: the Blues. Pure coincidence! And yet no more appropriate program could have been presented to mark the end of the Newport Jazz Festival. Jazz was born of the Blues. The Blues

GLOOMY DAY AT NEWPORT---2

are the very roots of jazz. From King Oliver at the turn of the
century to Charlie Mingus today, from Dixieland to modern, hot to
cool, there are always the Blues. Negroes have been and are the
greatest singers and players of the Blues. Negroes have been and
are the greatest performers of jazz. This is not racial boasting.
It just happens to be true. The Newport Jazz Festival has always
been, and rightly so, an integrated festival. But that its last
program should be---by coincidence, not intention---an all-Negro
program seems somehow appropriate. If the Festival must die, the
original creators of jazz are the ones to most mournfully sing
its dirge.

I did my best to have included on my Blues program some
white players and singers of the Blues---Jack Teagarden, Claire
Austin, Barbara Dane, among others. But all were either unreachable
or unavailable for that particular date. Result, on stage at the
last moments of the Newport Jazz Festival, there were only Negroes---
singing their sad old weary old heart-breaking deep-pulsing MUSICAL
rhythmic determined on-marching laughing-to-keep-from crying
Blues.

Jimmy Rushing was there, and Samy Price, and Betty Jeannette,
and Muddy Waters, and Otis Spann, and Butch Cage and Willie Thomas
from way down in the Delta, and the instrumentalists of the Waters
and Price bands who played with all their hearts, and Al James and
Leon Minns. They all joined in a great ensemble finale of the Blues.
Many of these musicians had never played or sung together before.
But the Blues is everybody's river. And then they all plunged in to
that stream whose source is deep in the heart of the people who
made up, "Trouble in mind, I'm blue---but I won't be always. The
sun's gonna shine in my backdoor someday."

GLOOMY DAY AT NEWPORT---3

Of course, those of us who love jazz refuse to believe the
Newport Jazz Festival is dead. The rioters were not lovers of
jazz, but young beer drinkers who had nothing better to do than
throw their beer cans at the cops. (Incidentally, according to the
police records, there was not a single Negro among them; and the
riots had no racial angles). An audience of 15,000 inside the
Park did not even know the riots were going on. Jazz did not
cause the riots. Jazz is a sad-happy human warm wonderful all-
embracing music that surely will shine in Newport again someday.

- 30 -