Review: 'Muddy Waters At Newport 1960' (Chess Acoustic Sounds Series)

The Newport Jazz Festival had always had a somewhat rocky history. A lot of (racist) locals didn't want a jazz fest in their neighborhood. This sometimes made it difficult to find a venue. Certain musicians took issue with the choice of performers, feeling that there should be more of a focus on artistry than luring in punters with popular entertainers, some of whom didn't even play jazz. Nevertheless, the NJF went down without too much incident from 1954 through 1959, and provided the music world with such transcendent events as Dizzy Gillespie's 1957 appearance and the classic 1959 concert film Jazz on a Summer's Day.

Then things came to a head in 1960. That year Charles Mingus and Max Roach threw up their hands with the watered-down Newport Jazz Festival and threw their own rival fest for jazz purists that came to be known as the Newport Rebels festival. Despite Mingus and Roach's efforts to pull attendees from NJF, enough people couldn't get into it that the situation got very heated, indeed, boiling over into a violent confrontation between jazz fans and cops. There were mass arrests, and the National Guard was called in. Langston Hughes, who performed a reading on July 3 and sensed that a point-of-no-return was rapidly racing forward, composed an elegy to the Newport Jazz Festival on the spot. He handed it off to another of the day's performers, and Muddy Waters set it to a slow, melancholy beat as "Goodbye Newport Blues". 

Hughes was at least partially right. There was no official Newport Jazz Festival in 1961, although it did resume the following year. But something good definitely came of the troubled 1960 festival when Chess Records released the classic live disc Muddy Waters At Newport 1960. The brooding performances Waters chose to open and close his set with seem to reflect the dark mood surrounding 1960's event. However, a mid-set run of "Tiger in Your Tank", "I Feel So Good", and a show-stopping "I Got My Mojo Working" fight through the conflict with energy and joy. Still, it's impossible not to get the grim message when Waters lurches into "Goodbye Newport Blues".

I wonder what Mingus and Roach made of an electric blues artist like Muddy Waters playing at a jazz festival, but blues fans wholeheartedly embraced At Newport 1960, and will surely be very pleased with Chess' reissue of it as the latest installment in its Acoustic Sounds Series. The stereo presentation is extremely well balanced, both in terms of instrument placement and tone. Everything sounds warm, yet cymbals and guitar still cuts through as they should while bass fills the low end with depth and clarity. Like all the records in this series that I've heard, the vinyl is quiet and clean.