Failure to fuse

The jazz-rock culture war at the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival

Authors

  • Matt Brennan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v1i1.73

Keywords:

fusion, jazz criticism, jazz-rock, Ken Burns, Newport Jazz Festival, rock criticism

Abstract

Festivals play a central role in popular music mythology. In 1969, the Newport Jazz Festival made headlines when producer George Wein controversially announced his intention to openly incorporate rock acts, including Sly and the Family Stone and Led Zeppelin, into the jazz festival. Newport 1969 is retrospectively represented as a symbol of the problems of integrating jazz and rock, but a critical examination of the festival and its coverage clearly illustrates how distinctions between jazz and rock—and jazz and rock audiences, for that matter—are socially constructed. This article will reconsider the importance of Newport 1969 by revisiting debates occurring in the pages of Down BeatRolling StoneJazz and Pop, and other music journalism during 1969 which discussed the merits of a merger between jazz and rock, and proposes that Newport 1969 was a watershed that exposed the key tensions in the emerging culture war between the two genres.

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Published

2007-03-01

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Brennan, M. (2007). Failure to fuse: The jazz-rock culture war at the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival. Jazz Research Journal, 1(1), 73-98. https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v1i1.73