Jazz Education & The Jazz Barn

In his just-published book, The Jazz Barn: Music Inn, The Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life, author 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.

The book’s subtitle succinctly states “Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life.” The book’s jacket expands that statement: “The Jazz Barn is the story of 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.”

That’s a pretty large order, but in my opinion, is warranted for an entity too long overlooked or given its proper place in the history of jazz.

In the book’s Introduction, Darius Brubeck states “The Music Inn experience was indeed influential. It was where crucial developments in modern jazz took place. What’s more, it repositioned that music in American culture. John Gennari reminds us to see the former jazz barn not as a relic of the past, but as the source of so much we consider normal today, and that a musical performance is imbued with the history of the place where it happens.”

Musicologist Andrew Berish observed, “Jazz has given us new ways to make sense of the changing spaces and places of American life.” The New York Times’ highly-respected jazz critic John S. Wilson pointed out that “What has developed in the hills of Western Massachusetts is a unique seedbed for jazz.”

Origin of the Music Inn

In 1950, a young couple from New York, Philip and Stephanie Barber purchased a portion of the summer estate of the late Countess de Heredia, property that straddled the towns of Lenox and Stockbridge, just down the road from Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and converted one of the buildings into an inn that could accommodate 65 guests. Their plan was to recreate a cultural environment in this pastoral setting for the kind of company, conversation and conviviality that they had enjoyed in metropolitan New York.

On a July evening in 1950, the Barbers opened the doors of the renovated farm buildings they had named Music Inn and invited Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax, and Rev. Gary Davis to perform in what had been a carriage house for an audience of 50 people who were the first guests at the Inn. A unique aspect of these gatherings as they gained popularity was that the musicians who were invited to perform also participated in the discussions.

These informal sessions became Roundtable seminars organized by educator Marshall Stearns that had several interlocking goals, the most important of which was “to systematize and codify the study of jazz, asking big questions about the music and its place in American life that were not being addressed in the jazz writing and commentary than dominated by highly fractious polemical debates between modernists and traditionalist about what constitutes real jazz.”

The Barn & Lenox School of Jazz

The popularity of the Roundtables increased to such an extent that in 1955, the Barbers remodeled what had been a hay barn on the estate into a 600-seat auditorium to house a summer-long series of jazz and folk concerts. Another development was the Lenox School of Jazz, which was created by the Barbers, Marshall Stearns, historian-composer Gunther Schuller and Modern Jazz Quartet pianist-composer John Lewis.

Over its four years, the School taught a total of 150 students from 20 states and eight foreign countries. It was a first-of-its kind effort where leading figures like Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, among others, served as faculty-in-residence. Its most substantial legacy is the impact its alumni and faculty had as jazz educators.

It proved to be the forerunner of what would later develop into jazz education programs and artist residencies in universities and conservatories across the country. A long-standing belief was that jazz, unlike classical music, could not be taught or, more to the point, should not be taught—that putting it in the classroom would inevitably rob the music of its charisma and authenticity and ignore the self-evident fact that natural ability was the key to jazz excellence.

The School of Jazz set out explicitly to counter that view when it advertised itself as “the first effort to present jazz as a creative and vital artform which can be presented and taught as other art forms are taught, in a serious and vital relationship between the student and the creative artist.”

In 1957, the Barbers bought and moved into Wheatleigh, a 19th-century, 33-room mansion which was the main house of the original estate and began converting it into a palatial inn. After a few years, they found that running two properties was more than they cared to handle. In 1960, they decided to sell the Music Inn and Berkshire Music Barn, which continued to operate under two different owners until 1979.

By the mid-1980s, the grounds had been transformed into a condominium complex with little other than a single building that was once the Potting Shed Restaurant to recall the glory days of the Music Inn, the Lenox School of Music, and the Berkshire Music Barn.

“Crucial to the History of Jazz”

Author Gennari’s final thoughts: “The book is about what happened in the 1950s in a barn, icehouse, and greenhouse and in the rolling meadows, winding wooded paths and rocky brook edges of an estate property overlooking a lake in the verdant Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. In retrospect, we can see Music Inn as a middle space between the modern jazz mainstream of the integrationist 1950s and the Black Arts explosion of the race-conscious 1960s and 1970s.

“No other bricks-and-mortar institution, no other physical space, no other place better registered the pulsing changes of jazz music over the course of the 1950s and into the New Frontier future than Music Inn. It was there, off Hawthorne Street in Lenox, where the jazz mainstream and the jazz tradition crystallized not just as concepts or ideas, but as courses of study and methods of sonic practice. It was there that the shape of jazz to come was mediated on, mapped out, argued over, imagined and felt. What happened there, against all odds, was a set of developments crucial to the history of jazz.”

♫ ♫ ♫ ♫

Adding a personal note: Reviewing John Gennari’s well-researched book, The Jazz Barn, was like a homecoming for this fellow native of Western Massachusetts and gave me a special insight into the life and times of the iconic Music Inn and Berkshire Music Barn. For three years in the early 1960s, I was the publicist for the Music Barn, promoting the summer-long series of jazz and folk concerts. It was my initial foray into the world of jazz journalism. When I arrived on the scene, the Music Inn roundtable discussions and Lenox School of Jazz were history, but as a non-musician, my association with the Music Barn was a wonderful and in-depth introduction into what has been called “America’s classical music.”

(Published October 2025 by the Brandeis University Press. Author John Gennari is a native of Lenox, Mass. and currently is professor of English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont.)

The Jazz Barn
Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life
by John Gennari
Cloth: $35 | E-book: $34.95
ISBN-13: 9781684582853
Pages: 254 | Size: 5 in. x 8 in.
Date Published: October 15, 2025
Imprint: Brandeis University Press