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Mckay, George 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7770-0502
(2018)
Festivals:The History of European Jazz - The Music, Musicians and Audience in Context - Francesco Martinelli.
In:
The History of European Jazz.
Equinox Publishing Ltd, Sheffield, pp. 707-718.
ISBN 9781781794463
Abstract
There is something quite remarkable across Europe about the contribution of promoters, producers, musicians and jazz enthusiasts to the development of jazz festival culture, which may have been overlooked in the scholarship, 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. 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. 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 (McKay 2005, 2015). 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 at Ostend and Knokke (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.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | jazz,festivals,europe,music,music ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1200/1210 |
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Film, Television and Media |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 11 Oct 2018 23:39 |
| Last Modified: | 21 Jul 2023 10:42 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/68464 |
| DOI: | 10.1558/equinox.33267 |
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