The Jazz Barn: a Book Launch

LENOX WAS AN UNLIKELY PLACE OF MAINSTREAMING JAZZ IN AMERICA 

By Anastasia Stanmeyer

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 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: 

The sight would have been unforgettable, if anyone had seen it. Two frail middle-aged

Jewish women and a young, strapping, six-foot 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 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. 

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