wasn’ t a place where musicians played jazz, but rather some sort of salon where people talked about the music. The professor was using a phonograph player to demonstrate the contrast between two different versions of a tune called“ King Porter Stomp.” He seemed to know what he was talking about. Their friend, the tall Black man, intensely absorbed, nodded his head in affirmation. Along with his co-workers, Weston had found Music Inn, a recently opened lodging establishment and cultural venue run by Philip and Stephanie Barber. Weston’ s nocturnal sojourn through the Lenox woods had brought him to the place where he’ d find his calling as a musician imbued with a vital cultural mission. He’ d been raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where his father, a Panamanian immigrant and a Garveyite fiercely bent on Black entrepreneurial self-empowerment, owned a restaurant festooned with African-themed posters and pulsing with the rhythms of calypso, blues, gospel, and jazz. Randy took lessons in classical piano, then, at Brooklyn’ s Boys High School, fell in with bebop-entranced schoolmates Max Roach, Duke Jordan, Cecil Payne, and Ray Copeland. But it was only after Stephanie Barber hired Weston as Music Inn’ s breakfast cook, and his off-hours piano noodling caught the attention of visiting musicians and scholars, that he found his path into a storied career as a pianist and composer who uniquely reimagined and revitalized jazz by forging fresh connections with Africa and Afro-diasporic culture. He did this by absorbing and putting to his own uses the curriculum organized at Music Inn by a Boston-born WASP Chaucer scholar-turned jazz historian named Marshall Stearns, the man talking about“ King Porter Stomp” that fateful evening— a man Milton Bass of The Berkshire Eagle dubbed“ the Toynbee of jazz,” and the New Yorker described as a“ horned-rimmed, clipped mustached, apotheosis of The College Professor.” Stearns— who founded and ran the Institute of Jazz Studies out of his Greenwich Village apartment— had immersed himself in the work of Melville J. Herskovits and other Africanist anthropologists and folklorists; virtually alone among jazz intellectuals of the time, he was keen to anchor the story of jazz in a larger narrative of African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American cultural continuity. His series of jazz roundtables – the name cheekily invoked the knights of medieval Arthurian legend – featured lecture / presentations by African and Afro-Caribbean drummers, dancers, and singers as well as African American blues musicians, folklorists and writers. Randy Weston returned to Lenox every summer through the 1950s, soaked up everything Tanglewood and Music Inn offered, and later relocated to Morocco, where he ran a café and performance space featuring music ranging from local Gnawa and Jilala to Chicago blues. Over the ensuing decades, Weston established himself as a preeminent successor to Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk as jazz pianist-composers. With compositions like“ Berkshire Blues,”“ African Village Bedford-Stuyvesant,” and“ Roots of the Nile,” Weston executed a bold remapping of jazz, a sonic triangulation of Brooklyn, Lenox, and Marrakech.
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BERK SHIREDESIGNINC. COM Ǫ B A N K R OW, PITT SFIELD, M A ǢǣǤǢǣ Ǧǣǥ. Ǧ Ǧ Ǫ. ǪǢǫǫ
The Berkshires seemed Dreamlike-JT
The Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life by John Gennari, photography by Clemens Kalischer( Brandeis University Press). The book release is on October 18 at Lenox Library. lenoxlib. org n
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Fall 2025 BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE // 79