With the financial collapse of producing company Festival Network LCC, it was thought that most of the archives of the Newport Jazz Festival would not be reaching listener’s ears anymore. In fact, there was also speculation that the festivals might not even happen in the near future.

Wolfgang’s Vault has purchased the archives to the Newport Jazz Festival and is offering free streams and paid downloads for live performances from many artists, including Ahmad Jamal, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk to name a few.

Log On To Wolfgang’s Vault

The Transition

Wolfgang’s Vault, a company based in San Francisco, bought the archives of the Newport festivals from the Festival Network last year. Bill Sagan, founder and chief executive of Wolfgang’s Vault, says the archives include many, many tapes: 1,000 to 1,200 individual performances, dating at least to 1955, the festival’s second year, and continuing to the end of the century.

It is not a complete audio record — certain years contain only a small number of performances, or are missing completely — but it is a major one nonetheless.

Since the purchase, Wolfgang’s Vault has spent almost $5 million, Mr. Sagan said, on making audio transfers and mixes of the tapes. (Neither Mr. Sagan nor Chris Shields of the Festival Network would reveal the amount spent on acquiring the archive itself.)

On Wednesday, November 11th, the company began posting free streams of a handful of performances from the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival, at wolfgangsvault.com. The first offerings included Count Basie, Dakota Staton and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. More have since been added, and rumor says that there will be 27 sets from that year’s jazz festival, including some by Ahmad Jamal, Joe Williams, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver.

The plan is to have hundreds more online in the coming months, from other years of Newport Jazz and from the Newport Folk Festival as well.

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