Hayes (2002), Pat Metheny (2003), and Dr. John (2006). Bassist Christian McBride made his Jazz Festival debut in 1991 as part of the Jazz Futures ensemble of young jazz musicians that also featured Roy Hargrove and Antonio Hart. In 2016, McBride was selected as the festival's artistic director and lineup curator. 2000s In early 2007, Newport Jazz Festival producer George Wein sold his Festival Productions company to Festival Network, a company operated by former Shoreline Media executive Chris Shields. Festival Networked owned and operated the Newport Jazz Festival with Wein in a senior position. Starting in 2007, the Newport festival began serving beer and wine at Fort Adams State Park. Wein began running the festival again in 2009 after the company that owned the event experienced financial difficulty. In 2011, Wein established the non-profit Newport Festivals Foundation, which has operated the jazz and folk festivals since. The 2020 festival was cancelled due to the COVID-19 crisis. Booked artists were invited to return in 2021. Citing his advancing age and the pandemic, founder George Wein was unable to attend the 2021 Newport Jazz Festival; it was only the third time he was not in attendance since the event's founding in 1954. Wein died on September 13, 2021. Notable performances and recordings Two of the most famous performances in the festival's history are Miles Davis' 1955 solo on "'Round Midnight" and the Duke Ellington Orchestra's lengthy 1956 performance of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue", featuring a 27-chorus saxophone solo by Paul Gonsalves. A reconstructed Ellington at Newport, from his 1956 performance, was re-issued in 1999. Aside from the actual festival performance of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue", including the distant-sounding Gonsalves solo, the original album used re-creations, note for note, of some of the set's highlights, which were re-recorded in the studio. The new set restored the original festival performance after a recording from the Voice of America (which broadcast the performance) was discovered and, among other things, the odd timbre of the Gonsalves performance. Gonsalves, it turned out, stepped up to the wrong microphone to play his legendary solo; he stepped up to the VOA's microphone and not the band's. Gonsalves' performance so excited the audience that the festival sponsors feared that the crowd was on the verge of rioting. The 1957 festival was well documented by Verve Records, which released 12 albums of recorded performances. The 1957 performances of Ella