The Barbers bought twenty-two acres from the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Lenox, next door to Tanglewood, and opened Music Inn in 1950. From the start they wanted something specific: a place where jazz wasn't just performed but studied, debated, dissected. Where musicologists explained where the music came from. Where audiences sat in folding chairs and listened the way they would at a symphony.
In 1955 they built a 750-seat barn for concerts. In 1956 Louis Armstrong opened it to a thousand-plus standing-room crowd. The Modern Jazz Quartet held a residency that summer and recorded an album on the stage. Dave Brubeck spent an entire summer with his family in the guest rooms.
By 1957 the Barbers had expanded the concept into a school. The Lenox School of Jazz opened that summer with thirty-four audition-vetted students. John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet was artistic director. The faculty was a list that today reads like a hall of fame:
Dizzy Gillespie. Max Roach. Bill Evans. Oscar Peterson. Jimmy Giuffre. Ray Brown. Kenny Dorham. Gunther Schuller. The Modern Jazz Quartet in residence.
In rural western Massachusetts, in the middle of the segregated 1950s, the most important Black artists in America were teaching. The students — mostly white, some Black — were learning at their feet. Almost nowhere else in the United States was this happening.
"In all my time writing about jazz — with all the extraordinary experiences I've had listening to the music and talking to the musicians — a phenomenon unto itself was the time I spent at Music Inn."
The school's most famous moment came in the summer of 1959. A twenty-nine-year-old saxophonist from Fort Worth named Ornette Coleman arrived on scholarship — a player most of the jazz establishment hadn't yet figured out how to categorize.
He played one night in the barn. Jimmy Giuffre — a senior faculty member and an established voice on the saxophone — was reportedly so transformed by what he heard that he ran up onto the stage and started playing alongside Coleman, blowing the way no one had heard him blow before.
Three months later Coleman opened at the Five Spot in New York and the entire conversation about what jazz could be was forever rewritten. Free jazz wasn't born at Lenox, but Lenox was where some of its earliest converts heard it and understood.
Of the thirty-four students enrolled that 1959 session, a third went on to significant careers in jazz performance or education. The faculty seeded American music schools. Gunther Schuller would later run Tanglewood's Berkshire Music Center and found the first accredited collegiate jazz studies program. The model the Barbers invented in a Berkshire barn became the template for jazz education in America.
Financial pressure caught up. In 1960 the Barbers sold the property. The Lenox School of Jazz held one last session in 1961 and then closed. The new owner expanded the barn to seat thousands and shifted the bookings toward folk. Under David Rothstein's later stewardship the venue reinvented itself as one of the great rock houses of the era — Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley, the Kinks, the Allman Brothers all played there before the venue closed in 1979.
By the mid-1980s the grounds had been converted into a condominium complex. Today, the original Potting Shed building still stands. Almost nothing else does.
Music Inn lived a second life as a rock venue. But the jazz center — the school, the roundtables, the audience that came to study the music — that ended in 1961, and never came back.
John Gennari is Professor of English at the University of Vermont and a Lenox native. His award-winning earlier book, Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics, is a foundational text in jazz studies. His new book, The Jazz Barn (2025), is the definitive scholarly history of Music Inn, the Lenox School of Jazz, and what they meant for American music.
Gennari knows this story in a way nobody else does. We're honored to have him with us.
Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall, Williams College. An exclusive book talk for festival passholders. 3-day and Sunday pass holders attend with first-come, first-served seating.
See the festival schedule →The Lenox School of Jazz is my inspiration. For more than half a century, the Berkshires has lacked a permanent home for jazz at the scale this region's history demands. The Williamstown Jazz Festival is how we put that right — and how we return jazz to its rightful place in the Berkshires' cultural pantheon.
The Williamstown Jazz Festival doesn't try to recreate the Lenox School of Jazz. That can't be recreated. What we can do is honor what it stood for: rigorous artistic standards, a serious audience, world-class artists treated as scholars and elders, and the conviction that American jazz deserves a permanent home in the Berkshires.
It is — we hope — the beginning of a long second act.