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    Bob Jones, Behind-the-Stage Force at Newport Festivals, Dies at 86

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    For decades he helped shape Rhode Island’s venerable folk and jazz events, presenting stars and unknowns alike. One colleague called him a “test pilot of jazz.”Bob Jones, who began as a volunteer at the Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s before rapidly gaining the trust of its impresario, George Wein, and going on to produce the event over two decades, died on Aug. 14 in hospice care in Danbury, Conn. He was 86.His daughter Radhika Jones said the cause was complications of dementia.Mr. Jones spent a half-century with the folk festival, held every summer in Rhode Island, as well as with its companion, the Newport Jazz Festival, and other events produced by Mr. Wein. He was there when Bob Dylan outraged purists by going electric at the 1965 folk festival, and he helped persuade Mr. Wein to resurrect the festival in 1985 after a 16-year hiatus.In his autobiography, “Myself Among Others: A Life in Music” (with Nate Chinen, 2003), Mr. Wein, who started the jazz festival in 1954 and the folk version in 1959, called Mr. Jones “an indispensable member of the hierarchy of Festival Productions,” his company.Mr. Jones in 1995 with George Wein, the producer of the Newport festivals. Mr. Wein called Mr. Jones “an indispensable member of the hierarchy of Festival Productions.”Collection of George WeinLike many of the people who worked for Mr. Wein, who died in 2021, Mr. Jones performed a variety of tasks for the folk and jazz festivals. Early on, he was in charge of arranging housing for performers and getting them to the stage on time.“Our closest call this year was Miles Davis,” he told The Newport Daily News in 1966. “He arrived at the field less than 10 minutes before he was to appear onstage.”For two years in the 1960s, Mr. Jones traveled around the South and Canada in search of new talent for the folk festival with the folklorist and mandolin player Ralph Rinzler.“They found these people who weren’t in the music business, who were playing on back porches and at house parties,” said Rick Massimo, author of “I Got a Song: A History of the Newport Folk Festival” (2017). “What still reverberates today is how they helped rediscover Cajun music, which wasn’t well known or appreciated outside Louisiana.”Mr. Jones and Mr. Rinzler’s roadwork led to an infusion of artists at the 1964 folk festival, including the singer and songwriter Jimmy Driftwood, the banjo player Frank Proffitt, the balladeer Almeda Riddle, the bottleneck guitarist and blues singer Mississippi Fred McDowell and the fiddler and singer Glen Ohrlin.Mr. Jones was also the road manager for international tours, arranged by Mr. Wein, that featured Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington in the 1960s and ’70s and Sarah Vaughan in the ‘80s.“Bob was an intelligent and low-key person who was unfazed by chaos and worked really well with artists,” Mr. Chinen, the editorial director of the public radio station WRTI in Philadelphia, said in a phone interview. “So you can imagine he was the right type of person to take Monk around the world.”Robert Leslie Jones was born on May 11, 1937, in Boston. His father, Edward, was an electrician, and his mother, Florence (Foss) Jones, was a homemaker.He entered Boston University’s junior college in 1956 and received his associate arts degree two years later, around the time he moved with his sister Helen into an apartment above Cafe Yana, one of the coffeehouses at the heart of the Boston-Cambridge area’s folk music scene.He was intrigued by the music, and, having some talent, began performing, favoring Woody Guthrie songs like “Do Re Mi.” He also took on the background role of organizing hootenannies, and found he enjoyed it.He withdrew from Boston University’s bachelor’s degree program in 1960 and was soon drafted into the Army; a conscientious objector, he served stateside as an Army medic. After his discharge, he continued to play music in the Boston area.In 1964, he was featured, along with Phil Ochs, Lisa Kindred and Eric Anderson, on an album, “New Folks, Vol. 2,” released on the Vanguard label. Mr. Jones in performance at Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass., in 1968. He was a folk singer before he began his long career behind the scenes.Charlie FrizzellOnce he joined Mr. Wein’s staff in about 1965, Mr. Jones became involved in nearly everything in the Wein empire, including the Grande Parade du Jazz in Nice, France, and the Kool Jazz Festivals — stadium shows around the country that he ran from 1976 to 1985 as technical producer from a base in Cincinnati.In 1985, Mr. Jones became the top producer of the Newport Folk Festival, which had been dormant since 1969, following the gate-crashing that had disrupted that year’s jazz festival, when rock acts like Led Zeppelin and Sly and the Family Stone joined the bill. The jazz festival moved to New York City in 1972, where it continued under various names for three decades. (Mr. Wein brought jazz back to Newport in 1981, but the folk festival did not revive as quickly.)In his book, Mr. Wein credited Mr. Jones — with part-time help from his daughters, Radhika and Nalini — with helping to restore the folk festival to life. Asked what she and her sister, both teenagers at the time, had done, Radhika Jones, the editor in chief of Vanity Fair, said, “My guess is that George saw that a younger generation was enthused by it, which gave him a sense that this was something that would draw an audience.”The festival lineup that year included Joan Baez, Bonnie Raitt, Judy Collins, Dave Van Ronk, Doc and Merle Watson, Arlo Guthrie, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. A year later, the festival became a platform for a future star: the bluegrass singer and fiddler Alison Kraus, who was 15.Mr. Jones was long immersed in the jazz festival, as a producer and production manager, with Mr. Wein retaining the title of lead producer. He was also involved in the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, known as Jazz Fest, which Mr. Wein also produced.“Bob was like a test pilot of jazz, always smooth and calm,” Quint Davis, the current producer and director of Jazz Fest, said. “His brain was like a Univac. He had all the knowledge to make a show work.”Mr. Jones’s active involvement in production ended in early 2004 with a diagnosis of Guillain-Barre syndrome, which left him mostly paralyzed and breathing through a ventilator. He recovered enough to stay on as an adviser and mentor through 2009; his daughter Nalini, who had been his assistant, became an associate producer and helped run the folk festival from 2004 to 2009.When Mr. Jones was able to return to the Newport site in August 2004, he was carried onto the stage by a forklift.“He loved logistics,” Nalini Jones said, “and he looked delighted.”Mr. Jones at Newport in 2015. His active involvement in production ended in 2004 with a diagnosis of Guillain-Barre syndrome.Alan NahigianIn addition to his daughters, he is survived by his wife, Marguerite (Suares) Jones; his son, Christopher; three grandchildren; and his sisters, Helen von Schmidt and Marcia McCarthy.In 1984, Mr. Jones sang at Symphony Hall in Boston at a reunion concert of performers who had worked at the storied folk music venue Club 47. Billed as Robert L. Jones, he was on a program with Richie Havens, Tom Rush and others.“We were stunned,” Radhika Jones said. “I was 12 at the time, but we really didn’t realize he’d been a performer. He’d sung to us, and we listened to folk music at home.“It was really special to see him onstage. This was a part of him we started to discover.” More

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      Why Nina Simone Was Always Ahead of Her Time

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      A recently unearthed live version of “Blues for Mama,” written by Simone and Abbey Lincoln in the 1960s, took on domestic abuse in a momentous way.Nina Simone was always ahead of her time. And in the mid-1960s she found a fellow musical innovator and ideal feminist collaborator in the jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln, whom she teamed up with to write the song “Blues for Mama.” When Simone performed it at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966, she introduced it as “a gutbucket blues.”“It will appeal to a certain type of woman,” she said, “who has had this kind of experience.”That experience was domestic violence, a trauma that the titular Mama endured and that others blamed her for causing. “They say you’re mean and evil/Don’t know what to do,” Simone sang. “And that’s the reason that he’s gone/And left you black-and-blue.”I’ve been intrigued by “Blues for Mama” since I first heard it on Simone’s 1967 album “Nina Simone Sings the Blues.” And now, thanks to Verve Records’ recent issue of the previously unreleased recording of her Newport performance — packaged as the album “You’ve Got to Learn” — we have an even earlier version of the song out in the world.“Blues for Mama” signified a new moment. Rather than accept the abuse and the negative rumors, Nina tells Mama to set the record straight: “It wasn’t you that caused his bitter fate.”The track appears at the album’s midpoint, before the politically trenchant “Mississippi Goddam,” a song Simone wrote in response to two tragedies in 1963: the assassination of the civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the murder of four African American girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Ala.Her fans are likely to have appreciated “Blues for Mama” as further proof of her musical dexterity and ability to seamlessly move across genres. And it stands out as one of few songs from the era to explicitly take on gender-based violence, actively refusing to blame the victim. “They say you love to fuss and fight/And bring a good man down,” Simone narrated. “And don’t know how to treat him/When he takes you on the town.”At the time, Lincoln, too, was known for both her vocal virtuosity and her radical politics, including her collaboration as the lead singer on “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” the civil rights jazz album from the bebop drummer Max Roach, whom she later married. Though “Blues for Mama” is one of Lincoln’s earlier songwriting credits, it isn’t so surprising that she and Simone chose to embed their critique of sexism within a blues format.“Violence against women was always an appropriate topic for the blues,” the activist Angela Davis wrote in the book “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.” Davis goes on to say that this is because the blues, as a genre, often blurred the boundaries that separate the “private sphere from the public,” making the violence that Black people experience in their homes as lyrically and politically relevant as what happened to them outdoors and on the road.Lincoln and Simone were, in some ways, extending a tradition that dated back to the early 20th century, when classic blues singers recorded songs about domestic violence, among them Ma Rainey in “Black Eye Blues” (written by Thomas A. Dorsey) and Bessie Smith in “Outside of That” (by Jo Trent and Clarence Williams).Later, Billie Holiday sang, “Well, I’d rather my man would hit me/Than for him to jump up and quit me” in her cover of the blues standard “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do.” (It’s worth noting that Dianne Reeves changed those lyrics in her 1997 take on the song to, “I’d rather my man quit me/Than for him to even rear up and think about how he might even try to hit me.”) Except for Rainey’s “Cell Bound Blues,” about a woman jailed for shooting her violent lover, most blues songs presented abuse against women matter-of-factly and as one of many experiences that led to their feeling the blues.“Blues for Mama” was the rare protest song that could galvanize multiple social justice movements — civil rights, women’s liberation and Black Power — at once. It would take a quarter century for Simone to reveal in her memoir, “I Put a Spell On You,” that her marriage in the 1960s to Andy Stroud was rife with violence, while Lincoln would later allude to the tumult in her relationship with Roach.“He was a great big drummer, but he was a gorilla,” Lincoln told The Chicago Tribune. “I got tired of him ‘gorilla-ing’ me and telling me what I had to do.” She also revisited the themes in the later part of her career when she, divorced from Roach, established herself as a consummate songwriter. She recorded “Blues for Mama” as “Hey, Lordy Mama” in 1995, and addressed abuse in the ballad “And It’s Supposed to Be Love” (1999).Perhaps Simone sensed even back then that “Blues for Mama” would have to be rediscovered to be more fully appreciated. That July evening at the Newport festival, she broke midsong to admonish her audience and declared, “I guess you ain’t ready for that.” More

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      George Wein, Newport Jazz Festival Trailblazer, Is Dead at 95

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      He brought jazz (and later folk music) to Rhode Island, and made festivals as important as nightclubs and concert halls on jazz musicians’ itineraries.George Wein, the impresario who almost single-handedly turned the jazz festival into a worldwide phenomenon, died on Monday at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 95. His death was announced by a spokeswoman, Carolyn McClair.Jazz festivals were not an entirely new idea when Mr. Wein (pronounced ween) was approached about presenting a weekend of jazz in the open air in Newport, R.I., in 1954. There had been sporadic attempts at such events, notably in both Paris and Nice in 1948. But there had been nothing as ambitious as the festival Mr. Wein staged that July on the grounds of the Newport Casino, an athletic complex near the historic mansions of Bellevue Avenue.With a lineup including Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald and other stars, the inaugural Newport Jazz Festival drew thousands of paying customers over two days and attracted the attention of the news media. It barely broke even; Mr. Wein later recalled that it made a profit of $142.50, and that it ended up in the black only because he waived his $5,000 producer’s fee.But it was successful enough to merit a return engagement, and before long the Newport festival had established itself as a jazz institution — and as a template for how to present music in the open air on a grand scale.By the middle 1960s, festivals had become as important as nightclubs and concert halls on the itinerary of virtually every major jazz performer, and Mr. Wein had come to dominate the festival landscape.He did not have the field to himself: Major events like the Monterey Jazz Festival in California, which began in 1958, and the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, which began in 1967, were the work of other promoters. But for half a century, if there was a significant jazz festival anywhere in the world, there was a better than even chance it was a George Wein production.At the height of his success, Mr. Wein was producing events in Warsaw, Paris, Seoul and elsewhere overseas, as well as all over the United States.Where Jazz History Was MadeNewport remained his flagship, and it quickly became known as a place where jazz history was made. Miles Davis was signed to Columbia Records on the strength of his inspired playing at the 1955 festival. Duke Ellington’s career, which had been in decline, was reinvigorated a year later when his rousing performance at Newport landed him on the cover of Time magazine. The 1958 festival was captured on film by the photographer Bert Stern in the documentary “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” one of the most celebrated jazz movies ever made.Mr. Wein’s empire extended beyond jazz. It included the Newport Folk Festival, which played a vital role in the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many other performers. (It was at Newport that Mr. Dylan sent shock waves through the folk world by performing with an electric band in 1965.) He also produced the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which showcased a broad range of vernacular music as well as the culture and cuisine of New Orleans, and staged festivals devoted to blues, soul, country and even comedy.The Newport Folk Festival, which Mr. Wein also produced, played a vital role in the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many others; it was at Newport that Mr. Dylan sent shock waves through the folk world by performing with an electric band in 1965. But jazz was always Mr. Wein’s first love.Alice Ochs/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesHis one venture into the world of rock was not a happy experience. Gate-crashers disrupted the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival, whose bill for the first time included rock bands, among them Led Zeppelin and Sly and the Family Stone. The Newport city fathers issued a ban on such acts the next summer; when both rock (the Allman Brothers) and the gate-crashers returned in 1971, Mr. Wein was not invited back. (The Newport Folk Festival, which had not been held in 1970 but was scheduled for later in the summer of 1971, was canceled.)He was not discouraged. In 1972 he moved the Newport Jazz Festival to New York City, where it became a less bucolic but more grandiose affair, with concerts at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Radio City Music Hall and other locations around town. Under various names and corporate sponsors, the New York event continued to thrive for almost 40 years. In addition, the jazz festival returned to Newport in 1981 and the folk festival in 1985, both once again under Mr. Wein’s auspices. Mr. Wein’s success in presenting jazz and folk at Newport helped pave the way for the phenomenon of Woodstock and the profusion of rock festivals in the late 1960s and early ’70s. But jazz was always his first love.Playing and PromotingHe was a jazz musician before he was a jazz entrepreneur. He began playing piano professionally as a teenager and continued into his 80s, leading small groups, usually billed as the Newport All-Stars, at his festivals and elsewhere. (He performed in public for the first time in several years at Newport in 2019. It was, he announced, “my last performance as a jazz musician.”) He was a good player, in the relaxed, melodic vein of the great swing pianist Teddy Wilson, with whom he briefly studied. But he determined early on that playing jazz would be a precarious way for him to make a living, and he became more focused on presenting it.The success of Mr. Wein’s Boston nightclub, Storyville, named after the red-light district of New Orleans where legend has it jazz was born, led Elaine Lorillard, a wealthy Newport resident, to approach him about producing what became the first Newport Jazz Festival, which she and her husband, Louis, financed. And the success of that festival determined the direction his career would take.The crowd at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1967. The festival became known as a place where jazz history was made.Associated PressGeorge Theodore Wein was born on Oct. 3, 1925, in Lynn, Mass., near Boston, and grew up in the nearby town of Newton. His father, Barnet, was a doctor. His mother, Ruth, was an amateur pianist. Both his parents, he recalled, loved show business and encouraged his interest in music, although they did not necessarily see it as a career option.Mr. Wein took his first piano lessons at age 8 and discovered jazz while in high school. By the time he entered Northeastern University in Boston, he was beginning to think seriously about a career in jazz.He served in the Army from 1944 to 1946, spending some time overseas but not seeing combat, and enrolled in Boston University after being discharged. Before graduating with a degree in history in 1950, he was working steadily as a jazz pianist around Boston.In his autobiography, “Myself Among Others: A Life in Music” (2003), written with Nate Chinen, he said that he knew by then that “music was a crucial part of my being,” but that he also knew that he “had neither the confidence nor the desire to devote my life to being a professional jazz musician.” By the fall of 1950 he was a full-time nightclub owner; by the summer of 1954 he was a festival promoter.Rough PatchesMr. Wein encountered some rough times in the early years of the Newport Jazz Festival. In 1960 the bassist Charles Mingus and the drummer Max Roach, protesting what they called Mr. Wein’s overly commercial booking policy, staged a smaller “rebel” festival in another part of Newport in direct competition. But both events were overshadowed when throngs of drunken youths, unable to get tickets to Mr. Wein’s festival, descended on the city, throwing rocks and breaking store windows. City officials shut the Newport Jazz Festival down, although the Mingus-Roach event was allowed to continue.As a result of the rioting, Mr. Wein’s permit was revoked, and he did not return to Newport in 1961. A festival billed as Music at Newport, staged by another promoter and featuring a range of music including some jazz, was presented in its place but was not successful. Mr. Wein was allowed back the next year, and the festival continued without incident until the end of the decade.Coverage of Mr. Wein in the jazz press grew more negative over time, and the criticism would persist for the rest of his career. In 1959, the critic Nat Hentoff called the Newport Jazz Festival a “sideshow” that had “nothing to do with the future of jazz.” (Mr. Hentoff later changed his tune: In 2001 he wrote that Mr. Wein had “expanded the audience for jazz more than any other promoter in the music’s history.”)Mr. Wein was sometimes attacked as exploitive, money-hungry, unimaginative in his programming and too willing to present non-jazz artists at his jazz festivals — criticism first heard when he booked Chuck Berry at Newport in 1958, and heard again when he booked the likes of Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and even the folk group the Kingston Trio (who performed at both the folk and jazz festivals in 1959). He professed to take the criticism in stride, but in his autobiography he left no doubt that he had forgotten none of it, quoting many of his worst notices and patiently explaining why they were wrong.Mr. Wein in 1970. For half a century, if there was a significant jazz festival anywhere in the world, there was a better than even chance it was a George Wein production.David Redfern/Getty ImageThe two Newport festivals had been established as nonprofit ventures, but in 1960 Mr. Wein formed a corporation, Festival Productions, to run what soon became a worldwide empire. At the company’s height it was producing festivals and tours in some 50 cities worldwide. Over the years he also tried his hand at personal management and record production.After years of, by his account, struggling to break even, Mr. Wein became a pioneer in corporate sponsorship in the late 1960s and ’70s, enlisting beer, tobacco and audio equipment companies to underwrite his festivals and tours. There was the Schlitz Salute to Jazz, the Kool Jazz Festival and, most enduringly, a partnership with the Japanese electronics giant JVC, which began in 1984 and lasted until 2008.“I never realized that you could make money until sponsors came along,” he told The New York Times in 2004. “The credibility we’d been working on all those years always brought media notice. And then the opportunity for media notice was picked up by sponsors.”In 1959, Mr. Wein married Joyce Alexander, who worked alongside him as a vice president of Festival Productions for four decades. She died in 2005. He is survived. by his partner, Dr. Glory Van Scott.Presidential HonorsOver the years Mr. Wein received numerous honors and accolades. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2005 and inducted into the French Legion of Honor in 1991. He was honored by two presidents, Jimmy Carter in 1978 and Bill Clinton in 1993, at all-star White House jazz concerts celebrating the anniversary of the first Newport Jazz Festival. In 2015, the Recording Academy gave him a Trustees Award for lifetime achievement.In 2007, nine years after a deal to sell 80 percent of Festival Productions to Black Entertainment Television fell through, the company was acquired by a newly formed company, the Festival Network. Mr. Wein remained involved, but as an employee — a kind of producer emeritus — and not the boss.Things changed again in 2009, when the Festival Network ran into financial problems and Mr. Wein regained control of the handful of festivals left in what had once been a vast empire. (At first he was legally prevented from using the names Newport Jazz Festival and Newport Folk Festival because they belonged to the Festival Network, but he reacquired the rights in 2010.)He also found new sponsors for the Newport Jazz Festival — first a medical equipment company and later an asset management firm, Natixis — to replace his longtime corporate partner, JVC. The folk festival, whose sponsors in recent years had included Ben & Jerry’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, had by then been without sponsorship for several years; both festivals were later partly sponsored by the jewelry company Alex and Ani.Mr. Wein at his home in 2004, the year the Newport Jazz Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary. He knew from an early age, he said, that “music was a crucial part of my being,” but he also knew that he “had neither the confidence nor the desire to devote my life to being a professional jazz musician.” Associated PressIn 2011 Mr. Wein announced that both Newport festivals, the only events he was still producing, would become part of a new nonprofit organization, the Newport Festivals Foundation.He eventually handed over the reins of both festivals, although he remained involved until the end. Jay Sweet became producer of the folk festival in 2009 and six years later was named executive producer of the Newport Festivals Foundation. In 2016 Danny Melnick was promoted from associate producer to producer of the jazz festival, and the jazz bassist and bandleader Christian McBride, who had performed at Newport numerous times since 1991, was named artistic director. (Mr. Melnick left the company in 2017.)The coronavirus pandemic caused the cancellation of both festivals in 2020, but they were back the next year. Mr. Wein had planned to attend the 2021 jazz festival, but on July 28, just two days before it was scheduled to begin, he announced on social media that he would not be there. (He did participate remotely, introducing the singers Mavis Staples, by phone, and Andra Day, via FaceTime.)“At my age of 95, making the trip will be too difficult for me,” he wrote. “I am heartbroken to miss seeing all my friends.” But, he added, with a new team in place to run both festivals, “I can see that my legacy is in good hands.” More