John Gennari The Jazz Barn review, recensie en informatie boek over de Music Inn, de Berkshires en de plaats van jazz in het Amerikaanse leven. Op 15 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij Brandeis University Press het boek van John Gennari over hoe Lenox een klein stadje in New England een thuishaven voor Amerikaanse jazz werd. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek beschikbaar.

John Gennari The Jazz Barn review en recensie

• “A brilliant meditation on art, place, and the political imagination as they entwined to the sound of jazz in postwar New England. Dazzling cultural analysis slyly delivered as a lively untold story.” (David Hajdu)

The Jazz Barn

Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life

• Auteur: John Gennari (Verenigde Staten)
• Foto’s: Clemens Kalischer
• Taal: Engels
• Uitgever: Brandeis University Press
• Verschijnt: 15 oktober 2025
• Omvang: 254 pagina’s
• Uitgave: gebonden boek
• Prijs: $ 35,00
• Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van het boek over het thuis van de jazz in New England

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.

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.

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