The 60th anniversary Newport Jazz Festival added an extra full day of music to its usual two, going out of its way to use its three stages to tout the music’s future while remaining mindful of its past. And the wet weather Saturday and Sunday did little to dampen festival-goers’ spirits.
Friday’s daytime sets were added largely to give exposure to newcomers of various types, kicking off with the Berklee Global Jazz Ambassadors (led by David Sanchez) and University of Rhode Island Big Band before moving onto primarily still young but solidly established pros. Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society was next onto the Ertegun Fort Stage (i.e., the main one), up against Mostly Other People Do the Killing on the CB Harbor Stage. The former showed off mostly unrecorded music, including tributes to computer science pioneer Alan Turing (“Code Breaker”) and rocker Levon Helm (“Last Waltz for Levon”) and the premiere of a new work commissioned by the festival, titled “Tensile Curves,” which Argue said was inspired by a famous moment from Newport’s past. He’d normally give the audience three guesses, Argue teased the crowd, “but you’re just so hip, I wouldn’t dare.” (That telltale phrasing suggested Duke Ellington’s famous, career-resurrecting 1956 performance, and sure enough, the new work was based on “Crescendo and Diminuedo in Blue,” but with Paul Gonzalves’ epic tenor sax solo stripped out and the piece refocused on Duke’s piano work.) Festival founder George Wein, indulging the sweet tooth many of his generation share for big bands, caught most of the Argue set from his golf-cart “Weinmobile,” and doubled back later to catch Miguel Zenón’s impressive “Identities” Big Band (Zenón’s longstanding quartet augmented by a top-flight horn section) blaze through material from Zenón’s forthcoming album, due in November.
