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INSIDER’S SPOTLIGHT
DIPLOMATS OF JAZZ Newport Jazz Festival founder George Wein and major supporter Natixis Global Asset Management CEO John Hailer up the tempo for a new jazz age. BY STEVE HOUK
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t was jazz great John Coltrane who once said, “When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.” Take three of his words — “music,” “possibilities” and “good” — and you know exactly what George Wein and John Hailer are all about as far as keeping jazz alive and kicking in the 21st century are concerned. Wein, 88, is the legendary jazz impresario who founded the groundbreaking Newport Jazz Festival that celebrates its 60th year this August. Hailer, 54, is a lifelong-jazz-fan-cum-CEO whose company Natixis Global Asset Management (NGAM) has been an instrumental supporter and sponsor of the festival for the last several years. Together, they have forged a passionate partnership and a fierce commitment to foster a love of jazz for future generations, not only in a performance setting, but also in the vitally important educational one. Since 1954, Newport has set the standard for live jazz festivals with the likes of Ellington, Brubeck, Fitzgerald, Davis and Marsalis blowing away audiences year after year. For its 60th anniversary this summer, fans will get their current jazz masters for sure,Wynton included. Wein always sees the future where jazz is concerned, which is why he injected a shot of youth into Newport this year by inviting student jazz bands from around New England to show off their chops, giving the festival a younger vibe on opening night that will likely linger throughout the weekend. It’s part of a calculated effort by Wein and Hailer to energize the jazz youth movement on a profound level. “Things have changed. Jazz is a music of music schools now,” Wein says. “Thousands of kids are going to great universities and they come out with degrees in jazz and have creative thinking in their heads. So, there’s a lot of great music out there, and we’re just trying to present as much of it as possible.That is the purpose and
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George Wein (Photo by Ayano Hisa)
John Hailer (Courtesy photo)
the aim of the festival now. It’s all part of reaching out to young people.” Hailer, who as a teen in the 1970s took all of his father’s jazz albums to college and started a big band radio show, is ecstatic that he and Wein’s common vision is coming to bear.“We have a lot of college kids coming to the festival.You could feel the vibe last year,” he notes. “When you get a sold-out crowd and 30 percent to 40 percent of them are under 25, it definitely gives it a different vibe. I’m kinda psyched about that.” That’s a good thing. Not only has NGAM supported the continued success of the Newport festival, Hailer himself has spearheaded the “2014 Jazz Diplomacy Project,” a company initiative that includes support for high-level jazz roundtables including several at the National Archives.There is also a live jazz series with the esteemed Berklee College of Music in Boston and many other events that put the spotlight on jazz as a means of collaboration. But the feature with the most potential for impact are the scholarships awarded to kids who want to play but might not get the opportunity due to financial difficulty and other challenges.
For Hailer, it all starts at the core of someone’s educational experience. “When you learn music, you learn discipline, you learn how to be creative and innovative,” Hailer says. “If you get an opportunity to experience music, it leads you down a lot of different paths, like all good education can do. But I just think affordability is a critical need in this country, and we want to help put affordability at least in the hands of musicians right now. There’s a lot of kids out there who are working their tails off, and an extra few thousand dollars either way can really help them finish up school, or not. So for them to become a musician is important to us.” And for George Wein, seeing more and more young people come out to Newport is what makes him optimistic for the future of the musical genre. “Last year we had over 2,000 young people come,” he says. “This year we should have about 5,000 kids. It’s a tremendous experience for young people, plus we’re destroying the myth that young people don’t like jazz, and that’s the important thing.”
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