Darius Brubeck Writes Foreword for John Gennari’s New Book: “The Jazz Barn”
Cover photo of “The Jazz Barn” by John Gennari.
Foreword for The Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life by John Gennari
Written by Darius Brubeck
The Brubeck family lived in Oakland, California but my father’s touring schedule meant spending months of every year on the East Coast, especially after George Wein successfully inaugurated the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954. Dave Brubeck first played at the Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts (and at Newport) in 1955. It became a regular stop and a summer base for the whole family in 1959 and 1960. Dave and Iola moved into the Ice House with five kids, me aged 12 or 13, (my birthday is in June), Mike, 10, Chris, 7, Cathy, 6 and Dan, 4. Imagining what this must have been like for our mother makes me pause in wonder and gratitude. I’m now grateful that Gennari addresses not just ‘gender and jazz’ in relation to performers, but recognizes the role of specific women, such as Iola Brubeck, Nellie Monk, Stephanie Barber, and others who were not just helpmates but true partners, indispensable in furthering their husbands’ careers.
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. Of course, as a pre-teen, I didn’t understand the future impact of what I heard and saw, but looking back from the 21st century, the academic discourse, canon formation and the ‘permanent diversity’ we have long taken for granted, fall into place. I mean that literally.
John Gennari grew up in Lenox and is comfortable writing about its history and the Western Berkshire scene; relating it to broader themes, particularly race, and music. His main subject is how and why a liberal artistic and intellectual culture flourished when Phil and Stephanie Barber established a school of jazz at The Music Inn. He deploys an array of disciplinary lenses through which music, the archival photos and tropes about jazz and blackness are examined. He also raises the ‘moldy fig’ question of whether studying jazz ruins it, the quest for ‘legitimacy’ as well as recalling long ago local history, even the abolitionist movements of the 1850s.
Lenox and the surrounding Berkshire region is still a cultural resort area, principally because of the 1937 bequest of the Tanglewood estate to the Boston Symphony for use as a summer home. The Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops have presented outdoor concerts annually except during World War II and, over time, created performance spaces, developed educational programs and commissioned composers. The Music Inn itself was created from former service buildings belonging to the old estate in walking distance of Tanglewood. Bill Smith, my father’s intermittent colleague from student days under Darius Milhaud, was literally camping in the woods, when they collaborated on Brubeck a la Mode. The album’s cover shot was taken in a local ice-cream parlor.
I remember walking to Tanglewood with my Uncle Howard, who had earlier worked there as Leonard Bernstein’s assistant. Their connection led to recording Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra with a score by Howard on Brubeck Plays Bernstein Plays Brubeck. Percy Heath III (Little Percy to us) and Edwin Schuller were part of our small gang of children who had the run of the place. It was so safe.
The Ice House was on two levels, an upper ground level that was the main entrance, a living room and master bedroom and a lower ground level which led into a wing of converted stables and directly onto the stage. The kids were all downstairs in bunk beds with a hall serving as a little common area. Concerts, literally next door, were our main source of entertainment or at least distraction.
In his un-published autobiography, Dave recalls:
One night the younger children had gone to bed a bit earlier than usual. It was a warm night, so only the screen door separated their quarters from backstage. They were sound asleep when Stan Kenton’s band hit the stand and the brass section opened up on their first number. Six-year-old Cathy, clad in her long white nightgown, marched out the screen door and stood at the side of the stage, hands on hips, glaring at the trumpet section perched high on the risers. She yelled up to them “How do you expect a guy to get any sleep around here?” No one in the brass section could keep a straight face…….
Ornette Coleman had a room further along the stable wing. We used to giggle quietly on our side of the thin wall when he practiced. I had been playing trumpet for a couple of years and Mike had just started saxophone lessons. For me, practice meant starting with long tones, carefully going through some warm-up exercises, then reading through short, simple pieces designed to gradually improve range and articulation. Ornette’s practice routine was pop the latches on the case, take out the horn – a plastic alto sax - and play anything – anything! – up and down, fast and slow, out of tune; pause, squeal a little more, then put the horn away. This is how it seemed to us, yet in performance his music was profoundly solemn and organized.
The 50s has been characterized as an ultra-conservative decade but also as a Second American Renaissance. Perhaps It depends on which part you remember - the jazz, the literature, the art? Or Jim Crow segregation, restrictive social and sartorial codes. Lenox became a country retreat of choice for Black middle-class musicians and literary figures who mixed with like-minded whites in big cities. They had much in common: a commitment to Civil Rights, resistance to right-wing McCarthyism and enthusiasm for all-encompassing modernism.
Folk music was already regularly performed and studied at the Inn, and jazz came a little later. A nexus like this had never existed before, but it was consistent with the spirit of the place. I had the supremely good fortune of being there at this time and this is why I personally appreciate Gennari’s fascinating and uplifting study. (John was only born in 1960). I was allowed to attend Marshall Stearns’ classes, where I heard Alan Lomax’s Library of Congress recordings of Jelly Roll Morton for the first time and a lecture on the blues where I learned why ‘blue notes’ don’t exist on the piano keyboard.
Most of my adult career has been in jazz education. Musicians formerly associated with Lenox were of inestimable assistance when I started the first university degree in jazz studies in South Africa. Larry Ridley came as a Fulbright professor, Jamey Aebersold gave us his whole set of play-a -longs, Billy Taylor put my premiere student ensemble, The Jazzanians on national TV in America and David Baker, welcomed the first jazz pedagogy master’s degree student from South Africa to Indiana University. The School of Jazz created by the Barbers, Gunther Schuller and John Lewis only lasted 4 years but, as my father also wrote:
This fledgling school was a forerunner of what would later develop into jazz education programs and artist residencies in universities and conservatories across the country. The amazing musicians who were instructors were all consummate artists who were pushing the boundaries and shaping the future of jazz. The concepts being taught and discussed may seem obvious in retrospect, but at that time were considered innovative and contentious. It was an exciting time to be immersed in jazz.
The last time I was in Lenox was in August 2003 for an ‘Evening at the Pops’ concert at Tanglewood, which featured violinists Regina Carter, Eileen Ivers, and Lara St. John as soloists in my brother Chris’s “Interplay for Three Violins and Orchestra”. The name Regina Carter is well known to jazz fans; Eileen Ivers is a renowned master in the Irish fiddle tradition, and Lara St John is an internationally admired classical soloist. The Music Inn buildings had long since been converted into a condo complex so the Brubeck party stayed at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge. We felt we had to visit the old site, somewhat like visiting a famous monument. Chris’s syncretic piece conveyed the old Lenox spirit that I carried with me to South Africa and back again.
John Gennari’s book encourages one to see the former jazz barn, not as a relic of the past but the source of so much we consider normal today. It is often said that places like Carneigie Hall or the Village Vanguard somehow hold the vibrations of the music performed there. Conversely, Gennari reminds us that “a musical performance is imbued with the history of the place where it happens”. I’m delighted and enriched by his restorative and significant book.