http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVMTwxLY7b4

So one of the things I love most about The Mill blog is how fresh it is - always giving me some new songs, videos, art, blogs, etc. that I may otherwise miss.

That being said, I’m going to do something a little different with my first post. I’m throwing it back to 1958, specifically the Newport Jazz Festival in Newport, Rhode Island.

For the past few months, I’ve watched these two clips of Louis Armstong and Dinah Washington over and over again. They come from a 71 minute-long documentary of the festival by Bert Stern called “Jazz On A Summer’s Day”. I was compelled enough by them that I recently downloaded the film from iTunes, and its pretty spectacular.

Along with festival itself, there are some candid scenes of American life on a hot mid-summer day in the coastal New England city: a T-Bird convertible recklessly swerving down an ocean-swept road, a man and woman dancing and drinking on a roof, four men playing impromptu jazz on a children’s merry-go-round.

I love the songs and performances, especially the end of Dinah Washington’s piece. But what really gets me is the general feeling of it all - the audience, the performers, the clothes, the movements, the carefree, cool, jazzy attitudes on everyone’s faces and in their dancing. Its a bit sad because this is one of those moments in history that is absolutely impossible to recreate.

Whenever I drive back home to Rhode Island, I secretly wish I could cross the Newport Bridge, breeze up Bellevue Avenue, and pull into the Newport Casino and suddenly I’d be back in 1958, feeling the salty breezes coming off Narragansett Bay and swaying slowly without a care in the world to Miles, Dinah, and Louis.