The Summer Bashes

In hipster lingo, a "bash" is generally a jazz combo's one-night stand. Any bash that lasts as much as two nights is in danger of becoming a festival. Last week, under a hot July sun, jazz festivals started erupting across the land. As usual, the major hostilities started at Newport. Now in its sixth year and still the most prestigious of the lot, the Newport festival regularly attracts the royalty of the summer circuit --Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Erroll Garner, the Modern Jazz Quartet, et al.--at fees ranging up to $4,000 a package. The festival is extravagantly promoted, strenuously recorded and religiously re ported by some 500 members of "the working press" (including this year a Massachusetts optometrist representing the British Jazz Journal).

The four-day effort last week included the usual quota of afternoon and evening concerts at the city-owned ball field, plus a series of "breakfast seminars" conducted by scholars on such hip topics as "The Role of Jazz in American Culture." New to the scene was a pair of Russian wolfhounds representing Wolfschmidt vodka, and a "fashion-jazz spectacular" titled "Newport Is a Lark" and featuring such jazz-inspired fashions as a Bop Period "nasturtium-colored velveteen jacket lined and piped with hot pink shantung." Musical novelty: the "first authentic American jazz ballet," a 22-minute retelling of the Harlequin-Columbine story to music by the Modern Jazz Quartet. The ballet's major character innovations were a bop-goggled Pantaloon and a Beat Generation Harlequin, wearing dark glasses and T-shirt instead of the traditional mask and clown's costume.

Oaks & Eucalyptus. There are a number of festivals as ambitious as Newport's, and most of them feature the same names, though in lesser concentration. Playboy magazine, having been refused permission to use Chicago's Soldier Field, has contracted for Chicago Stadium (seating 20,000). The likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basic, Stan Kenton and Cool Comic Mort Sahl (see SHOW BUSINESS) will perform from a revolving stage, facing an audience decked out in souvenir Playboy jazz blazers and skimmers.

Much of the same crew will turn up on the grounds of the six-story, yellow brick Sheraton Hotel in French Lick, Ind. to blow to an audience sprawled on the lawns and perched in the surrounding oak trees, and in Toronto for a four-day blow at Exhibition Park. Both shindigs, together with the Boston Jazz Festival, are the handiwork of Newport Impresario George Wein, who advertises his various wares under the slogan, "Have Festival, Will Travel." Survivors of Newport are also expected this summer in the eucalyptus-fringed Hollywood Bowl (the First Annual Los Angeles Jazz Festival), New York City's Randall's Island (the Randall's Island Jazz Festival), the Michigan State Fair Grounds (Michigan State Jazz Festival) and Tamiment-in-the-Poconos (the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival).

Dogwood & Moonlight. More modest jazz bashes are blooming this summer in such unlikely spots as the grass-floored Dogwood Hollow Amphitheater in Stony Brook, L.I., where the Dixie combos of Yank Lawson and Mickey Sheen were engaged last week to huff through a program titled "Dixieland at Dogwood" to rows of seats built into the hillside. The Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood-by-the-Sea, Fla. has plans for an indoor-outdoor festival, with the jazzmen deserting the cafe one night a week to blow on the beach over the roll of surf. Carrying the idea one step farther, a Manhattan group called Jazz on the Hudson advertised a weekly four-hour, $3 cruise, with a different combo playing for the steamer's 3,000 passengers on each of the three decks.

By all odds, the poshest of the little bashes is the one staged at the 300-acre onetime summer estate of Plumbing Tycoon Richard Crane in Ipswich, Mass. There, in a sunken Italian garden beyond the 40-room Great House, Dave Brubeck, George Shearing & Co. are invited to blow their cool fancies in silvery electric moonlight.

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