In 1954, when jazz was still a popular sensation and Elvis Presley merely a teenage layabout, George Wein founded the Newport Jazz Festival. The idea seemed like a natural: bring together old-timers and rising stars for a weekend event that would celebrate jazz in all its glory. It didn’t really matter that the festival was held in the middle of nowhere (Newport, Rhode Island) because in those days headliners like Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday had genuine star power. Wein decided to make the festival an annual event, and he’s kept it going into the present, even as music fans seem less and less interested in a challenging American art music.

Now, to celebrate its 40th anniversary, the Newport Jazz Festival is hitting the road. Actually, it’s not easy for an entire festival to hit the road, so Wein has created a reasonable facsimile with a handpicked group of musicians. When the Newport tour plays Sarasota on Oct. 1, it will showcase 11 top improvisers, playing different kinds of jazz in intriguing combinations.

The tour’s mix of veteran stars (Clark Terry, Urbie Green, Jon Faddis, Lew Tabackin, Stanley Cowell) and young turks (Ken Peplowski, Howard Alden, Peter Washington) is pure Newport. So is the mix of styles, ranging from Dixieland to swing to bebop and beyond. In fact, the concert will offer audiences precisely the same thrill as an old Newport festival: the chance to take in the entire jazz tradition in one gulp. Most of the musicians have played with the masters—-Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Woody Herman, Art Blakey–and they know what it takes to make history come alive.

The tour also recalls the original Newport shows in its idealism. As always, Wein has assembled this dream team in spite of money troubles, logistical hassles and a variety of other problems that would drive Job himself out of the promoting business. Why has he devoted his life to this cause, and why does he keep plugging away in his late 60s?

“I like to make money—everybody likes to make money,” Wein declared in a recent interview from his New York City office. “But the whole reason I’m in the business is the music.”

Wein is that rarest of birds: a concert promoter whose artistic goals are at least as important as his financial ones. He produces jazz festivals because he thinks the public needs to hear this music.

From the beginning, the Newport Jazz Festival has reflected America’s mixed feelings about jazz. It was the brainchild of Louis and Elaine Lorillard, philanthropists who wanted to bring a little life into their quiet resort community. Newport was the summer playground of the rich, and in the early 1950s it had tried, and failed, to amuse itself with classical-music concerts. At a proper lunch among the Newport aristocrats, the Lorillards suggested a jazz festival.

The townsfolk were appalled. Some even suggested that the Lorillards were “traitors to their class.” Still, the pair pushed forward, looking for an organizer who could come up with a workable plan.

That’s where George Wein enters the picture. Wein had worked his way through college as a piano player, and in 1950 he scraped together enough money to open a Boston jazz club called Storyville. It was here, in 1953, that he met Elaine Lorillard, who enlisted him to run the festival. With his earthy Boston accent and touch-guy reputation, Wein was a provocative choice: shrewd and crude, the exact opposite of the Newport bluebloods.

The festival was planned for July 1954. It was the first outdoor jazz event of its kind, and Wein had to make things up as he went along. “We were feeling our way,” he said. “We had to work on sound, we had to work on lighting. We had to develop the concept of knowing where the artists were at all times. We learned that we couldn’t just say, ‘You be here at 8 o’clock,’ because a lot of times there weren’t there at 8 o’clock.”

Jazz lovers streamed into Newport, many of them New Yorkers eager to escape the city heat. You couldn’t beat the setting: The open-air stage and nearby ocean were a healthy alternative to the city’s nightclub scene. Everybody had a ball-—everybody, that is, except the Newport snobs. When the festival was over, they raised a royal stink. One resident declared she would spend $10 million if necessary to keep the music out of Newport. Another said, “I don’t mind the music too much, but the people are so vulgar.”

Wein battled the Newport naysayers, year after year. Somehow he kept the festival going, even though the critics hit him with their best shots: zoning battles, petitions, litigation. Wein fought all these offstage wars with one hand, and with the other he continued to book the kinds of festivals that, from today’s perspective, look like fantasy sequences set on Mount Olympus.

The 1955 festival, for example, included Miles Davis, Dinah Washington, Erroll Garner, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown and Chet Baker. The 1956 festival included Sarah Vaughan, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. How did Wein manage to crowd so many legends together on one stage?

“In those days, it was not the most difficult of things,” he said. “The artists had big reputations, but they weren’t big enough to do large concerts by themselves. They couldn’t sell 2,000 tickets to a concert, and the college circuit hadn’t developed yet. This was the first concert scene, and groups wanted to be in on it.”

Newport became known for its big moments: Miles Davis’ unscheduled set in 1955, marking his comeback from heroin addiction; Duke Ellington’s career-saving performance of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” in 1956; Mahalia Jackson’s heavenly gospel set in 1958, memorialized in Bert Stern’s film of the Newport Jazz Festival, Jazz on a Summer’s Day.

Wein kept the festival going in Newport for 18 years, but in 1971 he was finally laid low—-by, of all things, a riot. In the middle of Dionne Warwick’s set, a horde of young folks broke through the fence surrounding the festival area. They burst onto the stage, dancing wildly and destroying everything in sight. The police used tear gas, state troopers were called in, and Newport finally had the excuse it needed to shut the festival down.

But Wein, ever the optimist, vowed that the Newport Jazz Festival would continue-—somewhere, somehow. “This is not an end,” he said at the time. “It may be a beginning.”

In fact, it was. Wein soon announced that in 1972 the festival was moving to New York City, where it would set up camp in various sites around town. The festival ended up losing money that year, and many of the events drew poorly. But Wein stuck with the New York location anyway, and the event continues there to this day as the JVC Jazz Festival.

It’s much trickier for Wein to pull off his festival now than it was in the 1950s. Costs have risen, ticket prices have soared, and many living legends, sadly, are no longer living. But he’s lost none of his enthusiasm. In fact, when he talks about the current Newport tour, he sounds less like a businessman than a fan.

Saxophonist Lew Tabackin, he says, is “an incredible ballad player.” Clarinetist Ken Peplowski and trumpeter Warren Vache “do beautiful things with just a duet. And trumpeter Clark Terry, he intones with solemn conviction, is “a genius.”

The Newport concert will start with traditional New Orleans and Chicago-style jazz, then move into Ellington and Count Basie numbers from the swing era, and conclude with rip-roaring bebop and its offshoots.

“The whole idea is that you’ll have musicians who relate to the whole history of the music,” said Wein, who will play piano on some of the dates. “You’ve got people like Lew Tabackin, who can play John Coltrane like he grew up with him, but who can also play in the Duke Ellington mode. And people like Warren Vache and Howard Alden know the repertoire of anybody who’s ever played music.”

Still, Wein is less concerned with reliving the past than with building an audience for jazz’s future. This tour represents his attempt to keep the ball rolling-—the ball he set in motion 40 years ago.

“We’re so inundated with rock and roll in every area of our lives,” he said. “I felt a tremendous void, and this tour fills that void. There is a need for these types of things to let people know about the world they live in.”

That’s Wein the idealist. Jazz is art, and art helps us to know the world we live in. When was the last time you heard a promoter offer a philosophical reason for buying a ticket?

–Dean Robbins