Newport Jazz Turns 50

“The symbolic battle, all those years ago, was to make the world outside its own cabal take jazz seriously. This could more easily happen, it was decided, in a wealthy place that forced a certain kind of attention from social elites and the media. ‘We have no particular love for Newport. Yet in one sense of the word we have brought democracy to Newport, which was the last place in the world where it could have been expected to be found in America’.”