George Wein, Jazz Festival Trailblazer, Is Dead at 95 - The New York Times

He brought jazz (and later folk music) to Newport, R.I., and made festivals as important as nightclubs and concert halls on jazz musicians’ itineraries.

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.

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 had not been held in 1970 but was scheduled for later in the summer of 1971, was canceled.).

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.

In addition, the jazz festival returned to Newport in 1981 and the folk festival in 1985, both once again under 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.

(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.”).

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.

Wein encountered some rough times in the early years of the Newport Jazz Festival.

City officials shut the Newport Jazz Festival down, although the Mingus-Roach event was allowed to continue.

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.

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.”).

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).

The two Newport festivals had been established as nonprofit ventures, but in 1960 Mr.

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 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.

(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.

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