How a Boston Club Birthed the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954

Photo by Tom Copi

To go back to the very beginning of Newport Jazz— and really Newport Folk as well— get on Boston’s Green Line and take it to Copley Plaza. Walk one block south on Exeter past the public library to the Copley Plaza Hotel.

Long before Miles played Newport Jazz and said, “I wasn’t real popular at this time, but that began to change after I played at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955.”

Before there was Nina playing Porgy to a hushed audience in 1960, or Duke, who declared, “I was born at Newport in 1956.” Well before Dizzy, Monk, Mingus, Aretha, Frank Zappa, and Led Zeppelin in 1969 and before Common, Norah Jones, Christian McBride, The Roots, and Jon Batiste, there was George Wein, standing in front of the Copley Plaza Hotel in 1950 with dreams of a jazz club he’d call Storyville.

Storyville was named for the red light district in New Orleans. And Wein’s club would pay homage to this cradle of the American genre by creating a venue wholly dedicated to the music. It was a “true music room” as Wein describes it in his book Myself Among Others. “Storyville was never a joint. We had no floor show, no drug dealers or resident hookers. We kept things clean.”

But Storyville was a gamble. Having known “almost nothing about business,” Wein poured his entire life savings — $5,000 set aside for education but unspent thanks to the G.I. Bill — into the 200-hundred-seat venue. He bought a serviceable sound system, used cash registers and a second-hand piano. He opened the doors in late September 1950. The first act: the Bob Wilber Sextet.

A friendly deal with the Copley Plaza Hotel meant Wein would save money on rent in exchange for profit sharing down the road and an agreement to sell the hotel’s stock of booze. And for six weeks, Storyville was crowded almost every night.

And as good as it was going, it was about to get better. One night shortly after opening, the Louis Armstrong All Stars were playing Symphony Hall and Wein tasked pianist and former member of Armstrong’s band Sidney Catlett with getting them to stop by after the gig. And stop by they did. Louis Armstrong made a dramatic impromptu entrance before jumping on stage to sing “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.” Wein and Storyville had catapulted to a new level.

“A few weeks earlier, Storyville at Copley Square had been little more than a promising idea,” Wein says. “Now suddenly, as if by magic, the most eminent figure in jazz was in my club. That was it, as far as I was concerned. Life was very, very beautiful right there and then.”

Of course, that wasn’t it. Far from it. That was only the beginning.

Over the next ten years, Storyville would occupy multiple other locations in the city. That sweetheart deal with the Copley Plaza Hotel turned out to be a way for the hotel management to get rid of rot-gut booze bought during the war. Complaints from customers ensued and Wein closed the doors on that location just as the momentum was beginning to swing. Storyville reopened in Kenmore Square and then eventually moved back to Copley.

Over the years, icons such as Billie Holiday, Dave Brubeck, Johnny Hodges, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and countless others would play Storyville. Luckily, many of those performances were recorded and are still readily available on streaming services.

But how did Storyville give birth to Newport Jazz?

Each summer as residents left Boston, Wein would shut the club down and decamp outside the city. One year it was Gloucester Massachusetts, where a house fire drove him and his fellow musician friends back to the city. Another year, it was to Cape Cod, where a sort of pop-up version of Storyville was opened up for the summer. But in 1953, avid music lovers and Newport socialites, Elaine and Louis Lorillard asked George Wein to bring the Jazz of Storyville to Newport. Newport was “terribly boring in the summer,” said Elaine Lorillard. “There’s just nothing to do.”

Wein was invited to the summer community to explore presenting jazz to the well-heeled residents. He toured the famed Newport Casino (now the site of the Tennis Hall of Fame) and was impressed with the Gilded Age mansions but felt, “It was not a particularly jazzy place.”

The only other musical festival-type event happening in New England at the time was the Tanglewood Festival, a classical music series in the Berkshires. What if Newport became home to a jazz festival, he thought.

“I didn’t even know what a jazz festival would consist of,” says Wein. Nonetheless, he pitched the idea to the Lorillard’s who immediately agreed to fund it.

Soon Wein was running Newport Jazz and Storyville. Jazz would grow providing a bigger platform that performers of the day required. The jazz artists had “moved out of the realm of jazz clubs into the mainstream of American entertainment, commanding a far greater fee than a nightclub like Storyville could provide,” says Wein. In 1960, Wein closed the doors on Storyville ten years after it opened.

Today, we honor Wein’s legacy in a small way by naming this newsletter Storyville after the club that started it all. So stay tuned here for more stories from Newport Jazz’s rich history.