The 70th Annual Newport Jazz Festival
Newport, Rhode Island
Through August 4

The Newport Jazz Festival brings out the same reaction in me, a proper grown-up, that going to Disneyland did as a kid — okay, also as an adult. 

After about a four-hour drive from New York, you check in at your Newport hotel, you make your way to the harbor — schlepping chairs and other picnic and beach gear — and then you get ferried across to the other side. You wait on a long line, sometimes very long, and even sometimes longer than that, to get through security and admissions, and by the time you make it to the other side and get to where the music is, you’re dripping with perspiration and thoroughly exhausted.  

You start to wonder if it’s all worth it — especially the exorbitant prices of the local hotels at this time of year — but after a few notes of the music, you can’t help but conclude that it is.

I’ve attended a few summer jazz festivals of late, including Montreal a month ago, and surveyed the rosters of many more.  The number of unrecognizable names that I see is a general indication that there’s a developing group of artists who concentrate on the jazz festival circuit, and who are not booked at my familiar Manhattan venues like Birdland, Dizzy’s, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Smoke.

Sometimes when you first make it in at Newport, by the time you get there you’re too tired to go any further than the first band you encounter, even though there are generally at least three shows playing at once. On Friday, I stopped in at the Fort stage, in front of a band led by a young guitarist named Cory Wong.  

At first I thought this was what we once called “Smooth Jazz”; it was completely electronic, with keyboards and guitars playing a bright shiny music, but with one important difference: Back in the day, the Smooth stuff was primarily background music for offices and elevators; you weren’t supposed to actually listen to it. Mr. Wong’s music is worth listening to; it wasn’t supposed to be challenging, but it provides an acceptable mood for reclining on a huge lawn in a foldable chair while diligently applying sunscreen. I intend to listen again when I get back home, this time with my shirt on.

The great set of the day was by the veteran pianist Kenny Barron — he’s 81 this year — and his contemporary trio with the versatile bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa and the powerhouse drummer Johnathan Blake. This was a terrific 75 minutes of piano music, and because this group, with a couple of ringers added, also has a new album out, I’ll take the time to devote an entire column to them later on this week.

The climactic concert of the opening day was by the impressive Kamasi Washington; if there is a contemporary subgenre of the music that we may call “Festival Jazz,” Mr. Washington is its master. Performing at the Fort stage, he held a huge crowd enraptured. I had to sit so far away that I couldn’t even see who was in his band — it was even too far away to view the video screen — but it became immediately clear why he’s become so overwhelmingly popular in the post-pandemic era.  

Mr. Washington’s ensemble seemingly embraces every aspect of recent popular music; he has singers on stage, and even rappers — though the rap performed was seamlessly integrated into the music, and didn’t seem merely gratuitous, the way jazz/rap hybrids generally are. 

He incorporates hip-hop and old-school soul, hard-pounding percussion solos, classic rock guitar riffs — at least it sounded like a guitar — and he played soulful ballads as well as irresistible dance numbers. Somehow, he seems both retro and avant-garde at the same time. Yet you can never conclude that this music is anything other than jazz, because at the center of it all are Mr. Washington’s tenor saxophone solos, always sweaty and muscular and never remotely slick or smooth.

One last note: In 2016, George Wein (1925-2021), who had founded the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954 and almost single-handedly created the format of the contemporary music festival, relinquished control of the event to the bassist, bandleader, and eloquent jazz spokesman, Christian McBride.  This is my first trip back to Newport since Mr. McBride has taken over, and he is a highly affable host, with a very warm and positive energy.  

The festival isn’t the same kind of event that it was 70 years ago, when Wein had to fight to establish that jazz was a worthy enough art form to sustain both the commercial and artistic necessities of being presented in this way, but the event — and the music — are thriving in Mr. McBride’s powerful and capable hands.