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21 July 2023 – Today marks the Verve Records/UMe/Universal Music Canada release of You’ve Got To Learn, a previously-unreleased recording of Nina Simone’s performance at the 1966 Newport Jazz Festival. The album arrives as part of the “Happy Birthday Miss Simone” campaign, a year-long celebration of Simone’s 90th birthday.

You’ve Got To Learn is a major find for Simone’s fans. The album includes Simone’s first-ever recording of “Music For Lovers” and “Blues For Mama,” as well as the only-known live recording of “You’ve Got To Learn.” The historic six-song set also includes a straight “swinging” approach to “Mississippi Goddam,” Simone’s signature protest anthem, that is unique to this recording—it’s the only known version of Nina playing the song in this way.

On July 2, 1966, the Newport Jazz Festival witnessed a legendary set by Simone that has remained etched in the memory of Nina...

We live in a seemingly never-ending age of music documentaries. In the last decade, everyone from Billie Eilish to Linda Ronstadt to A Band Called Death has had their story chronicled on film. This year alone has seen pictures about David Bowie, Jennifer Lopez, Kanye West, Sinéad O'Connor, Olivia Rodrigo, Dio, Sheryl Crow, XXXTentacion, Tanya Tucker, Nick Cave, and the New York City music scene of the early 2000s. I wouldn't be surprised if there are films I'm forgetting there. Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern, the co-directors of "Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story," have even made documentaries about The Bee Gees and the collaboration between Carole King and James Taylor, both of which have been released within the last two years. Music documentaries are inescapable.

What makes this overwhelming saturation even more depressing is how uninterested these films are at digging deep into their subjects. Most of the films...

Newport, Rhode Island — A decade ago, Pete Seeger gave the organizers of the Newport Folk Festival a mission statement. “If you’re going to have the torch, I need to know you’re going to continue to give the people who need a voice the voice,” Jay Sweet, the long-running festival’s executive director, recalls the folk legend and festival co-founder telling him at Seeger’s final Newport appearance before his death in 2014.

What he meant was simple, according to Sweet. “My job,” he continues, “is to allow people to participate,...

Only a couple of days into June and the movies are bombarding us with some nifty vacation options. Let’s see, we just took a wild funny trek to Fire Island in the northeastern part of the country, so where “to” now virtually? Well, the last one was a scripted twist on the “rom-com”, so how about a non-fiction flick? Yes, a documentary feature (now don’t you whine and cry “Homework?!”), but it’s also a concert overview. In fact, it’s a toe-tapping delight, much in the vein of last year’s Oscar-winner (and crowd-pleaser) Summer Of Soul. We’re still in the good ole’ US of A, but a lot further south and a bit west. And though this on-the-bayou burg is known usually for one type of tune, this film looks at an annual event that’s a celebration of all things musical from all around the world.

If you’ve noticed a lot of music documentaries hitting your favorite platforms, that groundswell is driven by record companies like Universal Music Group looking for ways to invigorate their catalogues. So it makes perfect sense that a musician’s son like Hollywood super-producer Frank Marshall — who has long been Hollywood’s fave party DJ, worked on Martin Scorsese’s The Band documentary “The Last Waltz,” and plays a mean guitar — would move into the space.

Marshall has directed a few features over the years and started producing non-fiction series and features before moving into directing with “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” and “Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name.”

There’s no question Marshall can afford to do whatever he wants with his time. He still devotes his day job to shepherding the latest “Jurassic World” and “Indiana Jones” sequels, and feeds...

The New Orleans Jazz Fest announced Friday that the Red Hot Chili Peppers have been added to this year’s lineup, stepping into the spot left by previously announced headliners Foo Fighters after that band canceled all their 2022 tour plans following Taylor Hawkins’ death.

Red Hot Chili Peppers Added to the Jazz Fest Lineup on Sunday, May 1!

Also don’t miss The Who, Stevie Nicks, Jimmy Buffett, Luke Combs, Lionel Richie, The Black Crowes and hundreds more, April 29 – May 8. Tickets on sale at https://t.co/siDGJzjRZf. #jazzfest@ChiliPeppers pic.

Norah Jones, Esperanza Spalding, and Angelique Kidjo’s Remain in Light are among the artists set to perform the 2022 Newport Jazz Festival, which takes place at Fort Adams State Park in Newport, Rhode Island July 29 through July 31.

The lineup also includes the Fearless Flyers, Terence Blanchard, Pj Morton, the Ron Carter Quartet, BadBadNotGood, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Lettuce, and Cory Wong, among many others.

Christian McBride, who serves as the Newport Jazz Artistic Director, will also play his annual Jawn Jam featuring Makaya McCraven, Chris Potter, Vijay Iyer, and Brandee Younger & Mike Stern.

Let’s not mince words: “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” is a high-stepping, hand-waving, spirit-lifting gas. Co-directors Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern, with the invaluable assistance of editor Martin Singer, have fashioned an infectiously exuberant overview of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the Big Easy’s unique and enormous celebration of its music, cuisine and multiculturalism, by combining their own footage of performances and interviews at the 50th iteration of the star-studded annual event — the last before Covid-19 forced cancelation of the 2000 and 2001 editions — and archival footage dating back to the festival’s earliest days.

Those days might have begun earlier, fest co-founder George Wein reveals during an interview conducted before his 2021 passing, if he had accepted a 1962 invitation by locals to establish the New Orleans equivalent of his Newport Jazz Festival. But no, Wein, a white guy married to a Black woman, didn’t see how a...

George Wein, an impresario of 20th century music who helped found the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals and set the template for gatherings everywhere from Woodstock to the south of France, died Monday.

Wein, 95, died “peacefully in his sleep” in his New York City apartment, said Carolyn McClair, a family spokesperson.

A former jazz club owner and aspiring pianist, Wein launched the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954 under pouring rain and with a lineup for the heavens — Billie Holiday and Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald and Lester Young. Louis Armstrong was there the following year and Duke Ellington made ...

George Wein, an impresario of 20th century music who helped found the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals and set the template for gatherings everywhere from Woodstock to the south of France, died Monday.

Wein, 95, died “peacefully in his sleep” in his New York City apartment, said Carolyn McClair, a family spokesperson.

A former jazz club owner and aspiring pianist, Wein launched the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954 under pouring rain and with a lineup for the heavens — Billie Holiday and Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald and Lester Young. Louis Armstrong was there the following year and Duke Ellington made ...

George Wein — the legendary festival promoter who helped turn the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals into fixtures of the American concert calendar, founded the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and paved the way for the modern music fest — died Monday at age 95. His spokesperson Carolyn McClair announced the news.

“It is with immense sadness that we let you know of the passing of our founder and north star, George Wein,” read a note posted on both Newport fests’ Twitter accounts. “We have all lost a giant champion of jazz,...

Exclusive: Sony Pictures Classics has taken all global rights to the documentary Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story co-directed by five-time Oscar nominee Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern (Finding Oscar). Marshall recently directed the HBO documentary The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart which is in consideration for this Emmy season.

The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival presented by Shell, aka “Jazz Fest,” is the signature annual music and cultural event of the Louisiana city and has been called America’s greatest festival. Celebrating the music, food, and arts and crafts of all of Louisiana since 1970, Jazz Fest is an essential showcase of the rich heritage of the region, and hundreds of thousands attend the event each year. Local music heroes are joined on 14 stages by some of the most important figures in entertainment, highlighting the connections between Louisiana culture and the world.

The docu weaves together...

The first feature-length concert film with live sound, Jazz on a Summer’s Day paved the way for movies like Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Photographing the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, director Bert Stern and his crew captured performances by Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington and Louis Armstrong, among many others. A historic achievement, added to the National Film Registry in 1999, it was the first opportunity for some viewers to see these stars on stage, in color. To celebrate the film’s 60th anniversary, the non-profit IndieCollect and the National Film Preservation Foundation financed a new, 4K restoration that enhanced the soundtrack as well as the color camerawork. The restoration played to sold-out screenings at last year’s New York Film Festival, and is now streaming available via Kino Lorber’s Virtual Cinema platform Kino Marquee. With the film now available for a wider audience, the makings of capturing this momentous event provide...

This year marks the 50th annual edition of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. To celebrate, Smithsonian Folkways will release Jazz Fest, a five-disc box set of live recordings from the iconic fest, spanning 1974 through 2016. You can preview the set now with Trombone Shorty’s hard-grooving 2010 version of “One Night Only (The March),” a track from his album Backatown, which came out that same year.

The set’s 53 tracks span the various genres represented at Jazz Fest, while putting the focus on local artists rather than big-name headliners. Disc...

For this writer, the quintessential moment of the 2018 Newport Jazz Festival came in transit. A quick stroll on Saturday afternoon took me from the main stage, where Laurie Anderson was wrapping up a set of luminous, exploratory string-trio free improv, to one of the smaller tents, where octogenarian Memphis piano master Harold Mabern, saxophonist Eric Alexander & Co. were busy muscling through a set of exquisite old-school hardbop. The transition was disorienting in the best way possible — an illustration of just how broad this legendary fest’s concept of jazz still is.

Theodore Bikel. Theodore Bikel dead at 91: Oscar-nominated actor and folk singer best known for stage musicals 'The Sound of Music,' 'Fiddler on the Roof' Folk singer, social and union activist, and stage, film, and television actor Theodore Bikel, best remembered for starring in the Broadway musical The Sound of Music and, throughout the U.S., in Fiddler on the Roof, died Monday morning (July 20, '15) of "natural causes" at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. The Austrian-born Bikel – as Theodore Meir Bikel on May 2, 1924, in Vienna, to Yiddish-speaking Eastern European parents – was 91. Fled Hitler Thanks to his well-connected Zionist father, six months after the German annexation of Austria in March 1938 ("they were greeted with jubilation by the local populace," he would recall in 2012), the 14-year-old Bikel and his family fled to Palestine, at the time a British protectorate. While there, the teenager began acting on stage,...

Prolific stage and screen actor Theodore Bikel has died, aged 91.

Bikel passed away at UCLA Medical Centre in Los Angeles of natural causes earlier today (July 21), according to The Hollywood Reporter.

His long stage career included originating the role of Captain von Trapp and earning a Tony nomination for The Sound of Music, and having had the most public performances as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof with 2,200 between 1967 and 2010.

On the big screen, he played the dialect coach Zoltan in My Fair Lady and earned an Academy Award nomination for The Defiant Ones.

He founded the legendary Newport Folk Festival with Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand and George Wein, launched the Actors Federal Credit Union and later became a champion of civil rights in the Us.

Bikel is survived by wife Aimee Ginsburg and two kids.

The 2015 Grammy Award winners have been coming fast and furious for nearly three hours. That's the strange thing about Grammy night. Almost all of the awards are given out beforehand, so the actual telecast features only a dozen awards (give or take) and a wide assortment of performance. Follow along and join the conversation as I live-blog all of those performances, plus all of the awards, even though I have no real opinions on the inevitable winners and losers. It should be fun! 8:00 p.m. Et. "Madam Secretary" and "The Good Wife" will be back next week! 8:00 p.m. Thank you, LL, for reminding me of the things we were talking about after last year's Grammys. I remember none of those things.  8:01 p.m. "For those about to rap, for those about to sing, for those about to play, we salute you!" LL Cool J says, introducing...

Providence, R.I. — Roger Lewis has hauled his baritone saxophone to gigs in far-flung places, from England to Japan to New Guinea. He's played so many places he's lost count of precisely where he's been. But he's never forgotten Newport.

Lewis, a member of New Orleans' Dirty Dozen Brass Band, returns to Rhode Island's city-by-the-sea again this weekend for the Newport Jazz Festival, an event he calls "one of the greatest festivals in the world."

"I remember listening to that Ray Charles album from when he played Newport," Lewis told The Associated Press by phone from his home in New Orleans, where he had been practicing some numbers he expects to play in Newport. "We've played all around the world but to have the opportunity to play Newport has been a dream."

The festival begins Friday with performances by Natalie Cole, her uncle Freddy Cole and the Bill Charlap Trio...

New York — A celebration of Dave Brubeck's life and music turned into an ode to joy as family, friends and fans paid tribute to the groundbreaking pianist and composer who became the best known ambassador of jazz to the world.

Brubeck died Dec. 5, a day before his 92nd birthday, and a private funeral was held near his home in Wilton, Conn., shortly afterward. On Saturday afternoon, the only Brubeck family sponsored tribute took place before more than 2,000 people at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine featuring performances by Chick Corea, Branford Marsalis, Roy Hargrove, Roberta Gambarini, Hilary Kole and other jazz stars.

Former President Bill Clinton, in a statement read by Brubeck's longtime manager Russell Gloyd, recalled being "utterly captivated" at age 15 after hearing Brubeck's quartet in concert and then going home to play "Take Five" until his lips gave out. "I consider myself lucky to have...

Getty Miles Davis in Paris in 1991.

Nice, France — Among the staggering number of famous musicians who have played with the legendary trumpet player, Miles Davis, many will be on tour in Europe this summer, paying homage to their mentor and friend. With nearly 200 summer music festivals to choose from, the Côte d’Azur offers two of the most legendary open-air jazz fests, with top-notch international artists performing under a balmy, starlit sky at the water’s edge.

Festivities kick off...

Dino Perrucci Photography Lauryn Hill performing at the Blue Note in January

Is jazz a dying art form? WSJ drama critic Terry Teachout once asked in these pages.

Not a chance, according to the Greenwich Village-based Blue Note Jazz Club. In honor of its 30th anniversary, the institution will host the first inaugural Blue Note Jazz Festival during the month of June, the club announced this past week. Throughout the month, more than 80 shows featuring established jazz legends and rookie...

New York’s 10th Annual Fuv Feastival is giving plenty to be grateful for this Thanksgiving. On Nov. 26-27, the event will consist of some of 2009’s best live acts into just two days, like Gillian Welch, The Avett Brothers, Andrew Bird, Ben Harper and the Relentless7 and Pete Yorn, amongst others. The performances being aired on New York radio station Wfuv range from those recorded in the station’s very own Studio A as well as George Wein’s Folk Festival 50 at Newport....

Newport Folk is the granddaddy of American folk festivals and—were it not for the existence of the Newport Jazz Festival, founded five years earlier by the same man—it would be the granddaddy of all American music festivals. After five decades, it’s still run by its founder, the remarkable 83-year-old George Wein, who spun the folk fest off of the jazz fest just in time to catch America’s early-’60s folk revival.

Pete Seeger Photo by George Wein.“Oh, it’s terribly boring in the summer … there’s just nothing to do.” This off-hand complaint, uttered in 1953 by a resident of Newport, Rhode Island, is what inspired Boston jazz club owner George Wein to transform the quiet New England resort town into a showcase for some of the biggest talents in jazz and folk music. When he created the Newport Jazz Festival and, later, the Folk Festival, Wein couldn’t have imagined that he was drawing the blueprint for countless music festivals to come—from Woodstock to Bonnaroo and beyond. This August, Newport will host George Wein’s Folk Festival 50. (Legal issues have prevented him from using the name “Newport Folk Festival,” but he hopes that will change soon.) The celebration will feature performers from the festival’s earliest days, such as Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, and newer acts including Gillian Welch,...

Music fans that can't make it to George Wein's Folk Festival 50 and Carefusion Jazz Festival 55 in Newport, Rhode Island can still catch the performances. NPR Music and five radio stations are teaming up to exclusively offer a live webcast and broadcast of the two festivals.

NPR and stations Wfuv of New York, FolkAlley.com (Wksu) of Kent, Ohio and mvyradio out of Martha's Vineyard will cover all of the performances at the Folk Fest on August 1 and 2. The festival is celebrating its 50th anniversary and will feature musicians Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, The Decemberists and Neko Case.

NPR will team up with Wbgo out of Newark and Wgbh out of Boston to cover the CareFusion Jazz Festival 55 on August 8 and August 9. The festival will feature three stages with headliner Tony Bennett. Mos Def, Miguel Zenon Quartet and The Bad Plus with Wendy Lewis will also take the stage.

• Palm Pictures picked up a docu portrait today that, like last year's tragi-drama of La Vie en Rose demonstrates, musicans often come with open wounds. THR reports that the label picked up the distrib rights to the Tribeca film festival-selected Anita O'Day: The Life Of a Music Legend. "Legend" includes new interviews with jazz artists Annie Ross, Margaret Whiting and George Wein, along with rare footage of O'Day performances with Louis Armstrong and other musicians from her 1940s heyday. O'Day, who overcame alcoholism, rape, heroin addiction and jail time in her seven decade career.    ...

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NEW YORK -- A jazz singer's tragic life will hit screens this May in the Palm Pictures documentary Anita O'Day: The Life Of a Music Legend.

Palm picked up all North American rights to the portrait of O'Day, who overcame alcoholism, rape, heroin addiction and jail time in her seven decade career. Directors Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden filmed interviews with the singer shortly before her 2006 death at age 87.

Legend includes new interviews with jazz artists Annie Ross (Robert Altman's Short Cuts) Margaret Whiting and George Wein, along with rare footage of O'Day performances with Louis Armstrong and other musicians from her 1940s heyday.

The film premiered at last year's Tribeca Film Festival. A fall DVD release is planned following the platform theatrical release in May.

Palm's Ed Arentz negotiated the deal with Cavolina, McCrudden and producer Melissa Davis.