Louis Lorillard; Jazz Festival Co-Founder
MIDDLETOWN, R.I. — Tobacco heir Louis Livingston Lorillard, co-founder with his former wife of the Newport Jazz Festival, is dead at age 67.
Lorillard died Wednesday at a Providence hospital after suffering a brain aneurysm and falling into a coma. He had been confined to a wheelchair since a stroke in 1984.
In 1954, Lorillard and his former wife, Elaine Guthrie, talked Boston jazz club owner George Wein into bringing musicians to Newport for a summer concert on the grass at the Newport Casino.
America’s first outdoor popular music extravaganza brought together some of the world’s great jazz musicians, including Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman.
Lorillard served as festival president for several years after the concerts were moved to Freebody Park, a Newport stadium.
The jazz concerts never recovered from a 1960 riot at the first of that season’s concerts, which the Newport council then cancelled.
Lorillard served in the Army in Europe in World War II and after his discharge was assistant commissioner of commerce for St. Croix in the Virgin Islands and executive secretary of the St. Croix Chamber of Commerce from 1964-69.
He was a direct descendant of tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard, who owned the original Breakers mansion on Newport’s mansion row.
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