In 1954, wealthy socialites Elaine and Louis Lorillard hired Boston club owner George Wein to stage a jazz festival at the Newport Casino, and 13,000 fans descended on a town of gilded age mansions. This deep dive follows the turbulent history that followed: Paul Gonsalves's 27-chorus solo into the wrong microphone in 1956, the 1960 riots that brought in the National Guard and inspired Langston Hughes to write Goodbye Newport Blues on a telegram envelope, and the rival protest festival Charles Mingus and Max Roach staged over the pay gap for Black innovators.

The episode tracks Wein's structural pivots, from incorporating the festival as a for-profit venture in 1962, to booking Led Zeppelin and James Brown in 1969 and faking a cancellation to disperse 50,000 ticketless fans, to the 1971 fence-crashing during Dionne Warwick's What the World  ...