The Jazz Barn - by John Gennari (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The story of Music Inn is the story of the mainstreaming of jazz within the frames of post-World War II American modernism, middle-class cultural tourism, the civil rights and black freedom movements, the folk cultures of the African and Afro-Caribbean diaspora, and a body of folkloric and anthropological thought influencing the perception of those cultures"--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"[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"

"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"

"The Jazz Barn is engrossing and essential reading for those interested in developments in jazz in the 1950s and beyond."-- "All About Jazz"

"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"

"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"

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.