Now this is way cooler than hearing concert highlights on YouTube or that cell phone video.
This online archive captures concert performances from the days when music was consumed through fuzzy radios and black-and-white TVs rather than Spotify and Airpods. These are definitely worth a listen: three acts that performed at the 1958 French Lick Jazz Festival, held 66 years ago this weekend.
This festival held August 15-17 was somewhat of a Lollapalooza of its day: drawing 14,000 visitors and standing-room-only crowds to swing and sway to the top jazz artists of the era. Newspapers from coast to coast reported on the festival with accounts like this:
French Lick, Indiana, has made itself into a flourishing music festival almost overnight. With imagination and boldness, the Hotel Sheraton people have transformed this sleepy little Hoosier town into something that is being talked about all over the United States.
A June 1958 article from the Mitchell Tribune promised that "without qualification, there has never been anything like this French Lick Jazz Festival in the Midwest."
There was Stan Kenton, who later collect a pair of Grammy awards in the early 1960s. Performing with his 18-piece orchestra, Kenton’s set list at French Lick included “Artistry in Rhythm,” the leadoff track on his 1965 Greatest Hits album.
L-R: Stan Kenton, The Four Freshmen, Dave Brubeck.
The festival had a Hoosier flavor with The Four Freshmen, a quartet originally from Columbus, Indiana. They led off with “Angel Eyes,” a respected jazz standard remade by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. Their barbershop quartet style harmonies were emulated by the likes of the Beach Boys and come through in tracks like “It’s a Blue World” from their French Lick performance.
You save your biggest acts for the finish, and that was Dave Brubeck. Check out “Sounds of the Loop,” the final song of his act, and check out the raucous round of applause received from the 5,000+ spectators who packed the hillside bowl on the lawn of French Lick Springs Hotel.
Jazz legends Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington were also part of the weekend, and the festival was so popular it returned in the summer of 1959. All these years later, the wonder of the internet keeps the Jazz Festival alive. And with live music every evening in the West Baden Springs Hotel atrium and semiannual Jazz Under the Dome weekends, we’re still in that jazz state of mind, 66 years later.
