The Jazz Barn by John Gennari - book review for Nonfiction November

In The Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life, author John Gennari captures an exciting time in jazz at an unexpected place – not a smoky night club but a converted carriage house and barn that were turned into a concert space and casual inn. 

While this book would certainly appeal to jazz aficionados, I found it compelling for the way it depicts a place that brought together musicians of all backgrounds and races, as well as critics and fans, very close to Tanglewood, which was already established as a classical music summer destination in Western Massachusetts.

A New York couple, Phil and Stephanie Barber, had bought the property in 1950, and their friend, Marshall Stearns, an English professor and jazz writer, began organizing summer seminars at what was known as the Music Barn:

Jazz Roundtables, he called them – with musicians, scholars, artists, and writers became pivotal to public understanding of the music’s African roots, its folk properties, and its place in American life and culture. Later in the decade, the Barbers, Steams, Modern Jazz quartet pianist and composer John Lewis, and others collaborated in the founding of the Lenox School of Jazz, a first-of-its-kind effort, in which the idiom’s leading figures (Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Oscar Peterson, Kenny Dorham, Bill Evans, George Russell, among others) served as faculty-in-residence.

I was fortunate to be invited to a launch event for this book which featured a conversation between the author and Neil Leonard, professor and Artistic Director of the Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute, Berklee College of Music, interspersed by a live jazz performance by Boston-based vocalist, Rachel Ambaye. Gennari, a professor at UVM, has written about music and culture previously, but described how his interest in the Music Barn developed from exposure to the photography of Clemens Kalischer 1921-2018), a German Jewish refugee who settled in the Lenox area and became fascinated by what he observed at the Music Inn. An experience while traveling to Appalachia by train had introduced him to segregated America:

[H]e innocently sat in the ‘Colored’ section of the station waiting room, only to startle a Black woman on the bench beside him. The episode – in the nation’s capital, no less – awakened him to a harsh realities of American life and redoubled his interest in the lives of American minority groups.

As Gennari explains, Kalischer started photographing activity at the Music Inn not because he was a jazz fanatic but to capture the way scholars and artists of different races were engaging in debate as equals. This provided a prism through which the author could look at the way the Music Inn became a safe place for jazz to be discussed and shared.

Leonard and Gennari

As someone curious but completely uninformed about jazz, I have to admit that 90% of the names mentioned were not familiar to me but that did not detract from my great enjoyment of the book – in fact, it caused me to go to the jazz section of my library and borrow a handful of CDs. While I did enjoy when famous names like Billie Holiday, Aaron Copland, and Langston Hughes are mentioned, what I most appreciated were the background descriptions. This includes the importance of the arts coverage by Milton Bass, critic for the Berkshire Eagle. His willingness to write about the Music Inn helped establish its place in the community and inspired other newspapers to cover it. Gennari also explains that “1959 has been canonized as a threshold year for jazz,” and three of the four most influential albums that year had connections to the Music Inn: The Shape of Jazz to Come (Ornette Coleman), Time Out (Dave Brubeck, whose son wrote the foreword to this book), and Kind of Blue (Miles Davis – the bestselling album in jazz history).

Lenox is on the far left in Berkshire County (mapsius.com)

Michael Connelly’s detective, Harry Bosch, is a big jazz fan, and I kept thinking about him as I was reading (Harry's favorites are Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Chet Baker).  I also thought my father would be fascinated to read how the black musicians, suffering not just from racism but also lack of respect for their music, found a haven in the 1950s, just two hours away from where he was in school, preparing for a career in civil rights. I believe this would make a great gift for someone you know who is interested in music, history, and/or sociology.

Title: The Jazz Barn
Author: John Gennari
Publication: Brandeis University Press, hardcover, 2025
Genre: Nonfiction/History/Music
Source: Purchased at event

There will be another event with the author at the Boston Athenaeum on December 10, 2025, if you want an autographed copy. Reading this book was part of Nonfiction November's Diverse Perspectives.