The Jazz Barn

Gennari connects place, race, and music in a local story with global significance. He writes with the insights of a master writer, a jazz soloist who understands tone, rhythm, and the enlightening elegance of a thing well done. The remarkable photographs give us additional insights into the story.

This is jazz history at its best. John Gennari tells a fascinating story about a moment in the music's history that is as essential as it is uncelebrated. This highly recommended book is as thoroughly researched as it is engaging.

With a deep dive into a lesser-known institution in jazz history, John Gennari breathes life into every page of this fascinating tale of Music Inn in the 1950s Berkshires. Weaving personal accounts of growing up in the region with riveting cultural analysis of key players in jazz, this book is quite obviously a labor of love, and it is the reader who is the beneficiary.

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. I’m delighted and enriched by his restorative and significant book.

Gennari’s dynamic approach to place and movement, augmented by the many remarkable photographs by people with their own histories of place and movement, ensures this is no supplemental Jazz-in-a-Barn (and Inn) story, nor barnstorming travelogue of bands on the road—but collection of stories about encounters in a place of purposeful jazz-focused convening across communities.

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.