George Wein will celebrate the 55th anniversary of the historic Newport Jazz Festival and the 50th anniversary of his equally renown Newport Folk Festival by producing both a jazz fest and a folk fest in that Rhode Island resort town next August, according to a press release issued on March 3 by publicist Carolyn McClair — but perhaps without his sponsor of 25 years and independent of the company he helped establish just two years ago.
Wein, age 83, a pianist and memoirist as well as impresario, has put on jazz and folk fests in Newport, and an array of other jazz fests across the U.S. and in Europe, with sponsorship of JVC U.S.A., a division of the audio and video gear manufacturer owned by Victor Company of Japan for 25 years (prior to that the fests had other corporate sponsors). But the press release makes no mention of JVC or of the Festival Network, LLC, the company that resulted from Wein’s merger of his Festival Productions with Shoreline Media in 2007, now reported to be in deep financial distress.