Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life
Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life
Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life
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Description
Description
How a small town in New England became a home for jazz, challenging conventional assumptions about the relationship between culture and landscape, art and geography, town and city, and race and place. This is a book about what happened in the 1950s in a barn, an icehouse, and a greenhouse in the verdant Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Against the backdrop of McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the expansion of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, and postwar cultural tourism, two New Yorkers bought part of a sprawling estate in Lenox, where they converted an old barn and other outbuildings into an inn that could host musical performances and seminars. The Berkshire Music Barn went on to host jazz greats like Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, and Billie Holiday, as well as jazz roundtables grounded in folkloric approaches to the music. The Jazz Barn explores the cultural significance of venues like the Berkshire Music Barn and later the Lenox School of Jazz to tell a surprising story about race, culture, and place. John Gennari 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. By the late 1950s, the School of Jazz was an epicenter of the genre's avant-garde. Richly illustrated with the photographs of Clemens Kalischer among others, The Jazz Barn demonstrates that the locations where jazz is played and heard indelibly shape the music and its meanings.
About the Author
About the Author
John Gennari is professor of English and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge and Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Gennari's lovely book tells the story of the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts in the 1950s, where two New Yorkers bought an estate, then converted the barn and several other buildings into music venues--and became an unlikely host to the likes of Billie Holiday, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and more."-- "DownBeat Holiday Gift Guide"
"John Gennari makes a compelling case as to what transpired at the Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts in the 1950s had a significant impact on how jazz was performed, heard and taught in the years that followed."-- "Syncopated Times"
"The Jazz Barn is engrossing and essential reading for those interested in developments in jazz in the 1950s and beyond."-- "All About Jazz"
"Gennari takes on this fascinating topic of a place's influence on musicians and music with the same verve and skill he did in his 2006 book, Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics . . . In The Jazz Barn, he expertly writes of the complexity of race, culture, and place, and how the Berkshires--home to the likes of Hawthorne, Melville, Wharton, Rockwell, and Tanglewood--became a crucial space for the mainstreaming of jazz, and eventually an epicenter of the genre's avant-garde."
-- "Jerry Jazz Musician" "A brilliant meditation on art, place, and the political imagination as they entwined to the sound of jazz in postwar New England. Dazzling cultural analysis slyly delivered as a lively untold story." --David Hajdu, author of "Love for Sale: Popular Music in America" "Jazz lovers will relish this exploration of a crucial place in jazz's development."-- "Kirkus" "[Gennari's] insightful book is a scholarly yet accessible window onto a set of characters and sequence of events that, over the course of several years in the middle of the twentieth century, brought Hooker and other notable musicians to this bucolic outpost. . . . Gennari, who grew up in Lenox--a little too late for the splendors of Music Inn, except as a point of community pride--is perfectly equipped to tell this tale. He carefully navigates tensions around race and class . . . Gennari has terrific insight on jazz's critical and historical record."-- "Wall Street Journal"
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Brandeis University Press
Pub date:
2025-10-07
Length:
254 pages
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