Day One at Newport

My first day at the legendary jazz festival.

This post was published on my old blog on 7.29.16.

Through my internship with JazzTimes magazine, I am currently at the legendary Newport Jazz Festival as a credentialed media member.

I spent today behind the scenes, backstage interviewing artists as a videographer. The videos will be released by JazzTimes in subsequent months and I will post them here as they become available.

Our set up:

We kicked off the day of interviews with Jay Sweet, who, last fall, was named the Executive Producer of the Newport Festivals Foundation and, for the first time, became involved with the jazz festival. Previously, he had been the producer of just the Newport Folk Festival. He discussed his vision for the festival and his hope to create a community not unlike that of the folk festival.

After Jay, we talked with jazz guitarist Will Bernard, who released his latest album Out & About in March. Then we sat down with Singer Tierney Sutton, who discussed her recent collaboration with Clinton Eastwood on his latest film Sully, for which she and her group wrote the score.

We then spoke with pianist Danilo Perez, who discussed the social background that informs his music.

Shortly after we talked with drummer Stanton Moore, who is getting ready to launch his own online drum academy. And then we talked with trumpeter Shane Endsley, who recently joined the faculty at Metropolitan State University of Denver. We closed the day with pianist Sullivan Fortner.

One of the questions that we asked the artists was: What does playing at Newport mean to you? I was surprised (although I don’t know why) by how many of the artists made reference to Duke Ellington’s legendary 1956 album Ellington at Newportand, of course, Paul Gonsalves’ solo. It, obviously, makes sense, however, I sometimes think to myself that perhaps some albums/songs aren’t as influential as we may think they are, but it was phenomenal to see how much the artists appreciated the album and the way in which they talked about them.

We also asked if there were any artists that they had recently rediscovered. Several of them said the great Thelonious Monk. So, with that, I leave you with some Monk.