Chinen, Nate

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CHINEN, Nate

PERSONAL:

Born in HI; male.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Da Capo Press, 387 Park Avenue S, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

CAREER:

Writer, editor, poet, music critic, musician. Music reporter for City Paper, Philadelphia, PA, and Billboard Online. Cofounder, Virgin House Band.

WRITINGS:

(With George Wein) Myself among Others: A Life in Music, foreword by Bill Cosby, Da Capo Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to magazines, including Down Beat, Jazz Times, and the Pennsylvania Gazette.

SIDELIGHTS:

Music writer Nate Chinen's debut book, Myself among Others: A Life in Music, profiles the life and times of George Wein, "one of the two most influential jazz producers and promoters of the postwar era," according to Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post Book World. Most widely known as the founder and operator of the Newport Jazz Festival, which began in 1954, Wein is famous for bringing jazz to the masses. His influence stretched into many other parts of America's musical world in the second half of the twentieth century as well, especially as his Newport Jazz Festival continued to grow not only in size but in prominence, ultimately migrating to New York in 1972. Wein was also responsible for creating the Newport Folk Festival, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and the New York Jazz Repertory Company. His Storyville nightclub in Boston became a musical icon, the place where the Miles Davis ensemble, which recorded the classic album Kind of Blue, first came together. His Newport Folk Festival also witnessed the performance in which Bob Dylan went electric, to the raves as well as jeers of purist fans. Additionally, Wein's Festival Productions produces musical events around the world.

Chinen helped write the memoir of this entertainment powerhouse, producing a definitive life of "an entrepreneur and prime mover … [responsible for] thrusting jazz into new arenas of social acceptance and respectability," as Grover Sales noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. With the success of Wein's Newport Jazz Festival, which took jazz music out of smoky bars, other international communities also began festivals, from Montreux, Switzerland, to Tokyo, Japan. Chinen traces Wein's life from his birth in Boston in 1925, where he grew up part of the Jewish middle class, to the opening of his Storyville nightclub when he was only twenty-five and an ardent fan of jazz. Wein's interracial marriage to Joyce Alexander shocked both the groom's and the bride's families, but it proved to be a long-lasting union. The establishment of the Newport Jazz Festival in Newport, Rhode Island, also proved to be something a scandalous event in that staid community. As Sales noted, for the "old Newport aristocracy and city fathers … jazz was a four-letter word." But Wein persuaded local dignitaries to help produce the festival, the first to feature musicians including Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and the Oscar Peterson Trio, among others.

Wein's was an up-and-down career. Broke and facing debts more than once, he plugged along, opening other festivals and helping to build reputations in jazz and folk music. For Carlyie Mok, reviewing the memoir in Curled Up with a Good Book, Wein's voice does not add much to the story. "Wein adds just enough of his personality to make Myself among Others another run-of-the-mill autobiography," commented Mok, who further observed that "there's not much to say about the book as a literary accomplishment." Mok felt that "at times it seems as if one is reading the playlist of a festival—or Wein's personal phonebook from yester-year." However, Terence M. Ripmaster, writing on the Jazz Institute of Chicago Web site, found more to like in this "powerful, fascinating, often boastful read." Ripmaster observed that "an important feature of this biography is Wein's personal account of practically every important jazz musician from Armstrong to T. S. Monk, Jr." Similarly, a contributor for Publishers Weekly considered Myself among Others to be a "factfilled, melodic memoir, swinging with emotion and energy." More praise came from Library Journal critic James E. Perone, who concluded that this "important and fascinating memoir is well written and easily worth the price."