B y A n a s t a s i a S t a n m e y e r
THE JAZZ BARN
Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life of social interaction,” says Gennari. Lenox Library will hold a book release event on Saturday, October 18, from 2 to 3:30 p. m. Gennari, professor of English and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of Vermont, is the author of Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge and Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics. His latest book, The Jazz Barn, contains photos by Clemens Kalischer, which are expected to be on exhibit at the time of the talk.
An excerpt from The Jazz Barn:
JOHN GENNARI
The Jazz Barn: a Book Launch
LENOX WAS AN UNLIKELY PLACE OF MAINSTREAMING JAZZ IN AMERICA
In the late 1940s, American jazz pianist and composer Randy Weston began performing with Bull Moose Jackson, Frank Culley and Eddie " Cleanhead " Vinson. Retreating from the atmosphere of drug use common on the New York jazz scene, Weston moved to Lenox. It was there that he first learned about the African roots of jazz. " I got a lot of my inspiration for African music by being at Music Inn,” he said.“ They were all explaining the African-American experience in a global perspective, which was unusual at the time.” John Gennari’ s soon-to-be-released book, The Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life, explores how a predominantly white New England town became a haven for African American musicians and reveals the Berkshires as an important incubator not just of American literature and classical music, but also of the Modern Jazz Quartet and Ornette Coleman’ s“ new thing.” The Berkshire Music Barn became a crucial space for the mainstreaming of jazz, and by the late 1950s, the School of Jazz was an epicenter of the genre’ s avant-garde.
The Jazz Barn demonstrates that the locations where jazz is played and heard indelibly shape the music and its meanings.“ Every live music performance is a cultural event shaped by the physical spaces in which the music is played and heard, and the unique meanings those spaces carry as sites
The sight would have been unforgettable, if anyone had seen it. Two frail middle-aged Jewish women and a young, strapping, sixfoot seven-inch Black man traipsing through the Lenox woods under darkness of night. The year was 1950. The women had heard there was jazz being performed a few miles from the kitchen where the three worked together. The kitchen was in a school called Windsor Mountain that served as a summer camp for Central European Jewish refugees, many just a few years removed from the Nazi camps. They’ d asked for a ride over to the jazz place but none of the car-owning locals working at the school could come back that night to take them. This place was next to Tanglewood, they’ d been told, a short distance from the back of the music shed. They’ d been to a concert there and were pretty sure the fastest way on foot was through the woods lying between West Street and Hawthorne Street.
All three were musicians. They’ d recently performed an informal concert at Windsor Mountain. The women played short classical chamber music pieces. The young man played some of the bebop tunes he’ d picked up in jam sessions with friends from high school in Brooklyn. This was before he came up to Lenox for the summer to escape the scourge that had descended on his neighborhood when heroin came in and turned good folks into people to be feared. They arrived at a collection of quaint buildings off to the side of a big fancy mansion that looked like a five-star luxury hotel. There they found an audience listening raptly to a lecture being given by a man who looked like Hollywood central casting’ s version of an Ivy League professor. The women were confused. Maybe this
78 // BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE Fall 2025