In 1950 a well-off married couple, Philip and Stephanie Barber, opened Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, a historically white area of deep cultural significance. They later fashioned a carriage house as a performance center for all kinds of music, lectures, and tutorials grounded in the Lenox School of Jazz. A \u201cwellspring of American vernacular music\u201d was born with first-class musicians like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Stan Getz, and the Modern Jazz Quartet during a powerful postwar movement for racial equality. Lenox is Gennari\u2019s hometown, and in this book, the University of Vermont professor writes of \u201clearning to see jazz, the Berkshires, race, culture, and America itself in new ways.\u201d After providing some historical background about the region, Gennari notes that jazz \u201cmay be singular in the strength of its attachment to place\u2026and movement.\u201d For Black \u201cjazz pianist and Brooklynite Randy Weston, Lenox figured as nothing less than a life-defining experience.\u201d He got a job at Music Inn and was encouraged to play piano in the front lounge. Jazz writer Marshall Stearns created influential jazz roundtables showcasing Black artists and writers and was a founder of the School of Jazz. Music Inn\u2019s opening event featured folk singers Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie while still fostering blues, African, and Afro-Caribbean music. Gennari writes about eminent photographer Clemens Kalischer, whose photos of many Music Inn participants are included throughout the book. In time, Music Inn\u2019s musical performances \u201cmediated between the local and the national.\u201d The author profiles a number of the jazz school\u2019s outstanding students, including Ran Blake, Ornette Coleman, and Don Cherry. Dave Brubeck\u2019s Time Out and Miles Davis\u2019 Kind of Blue, among other albums, all had a \u201cdeep connection to Music Inn.\u201d Its liberal and multicultural ideology was key to the changes in jazz music throughout the pulsating 1950s.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1950 a well-off married couple, Philip and Stephanie Barber, opened Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, a historically white area of deep cultural significance. They later fashioned a carriage house as a performance center for all kinds of music, lectures, and tutorials grounded in the Lenox School of Jazz. A \u201cwellspring of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4475"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}