Hugh Hefner couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate Playboy magazine’s 25th anniversary than by throwing a big bash at the Hollywood Bowl featuring his favourite performers who knew how to swing while keeping their clothes on.
To produce the event he turned to jazz impresario George Wein, who had created the first outdoor jazz festival in Newport, R.I., in 1954, the same year Hefner launched his culture-changing men’s lifestyle magazine.
The inaugural 1979 Playboy Jazz Festival packed the Hollywood Bowl for both days with a lineup that featured some of Hefner’s favourite artists such as Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton and Count Basie as well as contemporary jazz stars like Weather Report, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. Hefner took the stage on opening night to announce that what had been planned as a one-time anniversary celebration would become an annual event.
“The response to it was so phenomenal that here we are 30 years later,” said the 82-year-old Hefner, speaking by telephone from the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills, Calif., in advance of this year’s event Saturday and Sunday. “I’ve had a lot of things to be proud of in my life but nothing more, quite frankly, than the jazz festival.”
Hefner, with the help of his young assistant Richard Rosenzweig, now president of Playboy Jazz Festivals, Inc., promoted the magazine’s fifth anniversary in 1959 by putting on the nation’s first indoor jazz festival which drew about 70,000 people over three days to the Chicago Stadium.
That event brought together a who’s who of jazz history with Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, Ella Fitzgerald, Ahmad Jamal, and the big bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Stan Kenton, among others.
“I felt that this would give us a more mainstream presence,” said Hefner. “The magazine was hugely successful in terms of circulation, but because of the nudity, the pinup pictures, we were having advertising problems. We managed to put together something…that [critic] Leonard Feather called the greatest single weekend in the history of jazz.”
Hefner was too busy with his magazine to repeat the festival back then. But after relocating to Los Angeles, the memories inspired him to hold another festival to mark Playboy’s 25th anniversary. He chose the Hollywood Bowl because the venue “had a tremendous glamour cachet…for a kid who grew up on the movies.”
