1950s
A01=John Gennari
american renaissance
Author_John Gennari
Berkshires
Category=AV
Category=AVC
Category=AVLP
civil rights movement
dave brubeck
dizzy gillespie
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
george
gunther schuller
interracialism
Jazz
Jazz education
Jazz history
Jazz photography
jimmy giuffre
john lewis
Lenox
MA
marshall stearns
modern jazz quartet
Music and place
Musicking
ornette coleman
performance
russell
sonny rollins
third stream
Product details
- ISBN 9781684582853
- Weight: 399g
- Dimensions: 127 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 07 Oct 2025
- Publisher: Brandeis University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
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.
