Music foundation to honor Music Inn legacy and founder Stephanie Barber
by Seth Rogovoy

(LENOX , Mass., Aug. 19, 1998) -- Ever since Philip and Stephanie Barber sold the Music Inn in 1960, its legacy as a groundbreaking center of jazz study and performance -- in the form of memorabilia, photographs, recordings and peoples’ memories -- has been without a home and in danger of being forever scattered to the four corners of the globe.

Nearly 40 years later, just a few blocks away from where it once stood -- what is now the location of the White Pines condominium development off of Hawthorne Street -- Music Inn has finally found a home at the National Music to raise Foundation’s headquarters on Kemble Street.

On Saturday night, the foundation will kick off a fund-raising drive to establish a permanent archive to house Music Inn-related materials, as well as to create an exhibition that will reflect the groundbreaking nature of the Music Inn experiment.

For Music Inn co-founder Stephanie Barber, it is only fitting that her extensive collection of Music Inn artifacts -- programs, posters, photographs, news clippings -- should be housed at the foundation.

“This is what Philip and I always wanted,” said Stephanie Barber, referring to her late husband in a recent phone interview from her home on Hawthorne Street, halfway between the old Music Inn property and the music foundation. “We always dreamed of having a place where musicians could come and relax or retire and to continue playing or teaching.”

For a short but glorious decade that is exactly what Music Inn was -- a rural retreat or oasis to which jazz musicians, historians, critics and fans flocked each summer to soak up the traditional and cutting-edge sounds of the quintessential American music. A Tanglewood, if you will, for jazz.

“It was really in some respects like being on shipboard, because there was really no delimitations as to hours or place in terms of when you could talk to musicians,” said jazz writer Nat Hentoff in a 1995 interview.

As a measure in part of its lasting influence on the jazz scene, such Music Inn veterans as Dave Brubeck, Percy Heath, Randy Weston and critic Ira Gitler will be on hand at Saturday night’s dinner -- to be held at the foundation’s Music Centre Theatre preceding the Sonny Rollins concert at 8 -- to pay tribute to the efforts of the Barbers and people like jazz historian Marshall Stearns, academician J. Foster and pianist/composer John Lewis, all of whom were instrumental in fostering an environment in which jazz could be listened to, studied and appreciated with the dignity and respect afforded to classical music.

In the 1950s, this was no small achievement. At the time, jazz was still viewed in large part as a risque music -- the soundtrack to a minority culture best kept to its place in smoky bars and saloons. It was the Barbers idea to rectify that, to provide musicians and audiences alike with a comfortable setting in which to interact along the lines of Tanglewood just down the road.

“We thought it was a shame that you couldn’t hear wonderful jazz unless you went to some smoke-filled dive on Fifty-second Street or in the Village,” said Barber in 1995. “The only jobs musicians could get then were in cellars or nightclubs full of smoke and lots of talk, where they got paid very little. We thought it would be marvelous for them to have a concert hall where they could present their music -- their own Carnegie Hall.”

“I remember it as a very futuristic place in that it presented the jazz musicians in a very dignified setting,” said Sonny Rollins, in a recent phone interview from his home in upstate New York.

“At that time that was somewhat ahead of its time. There was a real atmosphere of scholarship and dignity. We can safely say that things have regressed since then. There’s no place quite like it now,” said Rollins, who appears on a live album with the Modern Jazz Quartet recorded at Music Inn.

“Music Inn is why I moved up here,” said clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, in a phone interview from his West Stockbridge home in 1995. Like Rollins, Giuffre also appears on a live album with the MJQ recorded at Music Inn. “There wasn’t any other place like it. It was fun to go there every summer. Too bad it stopped.”

By 1957, the success of the annual roundtables and workshops -- in which jazz was studied, analyzed and deconstructed as never before -- evolved into the Lenox School of Jazz, one of the first of its kind. For the next three summers every August pros like John Lewis, Dizzy Gillespie, Jimmy Giuffre, Lennie Tristano and Max Roach trained a new generation of jazz players, among whom were numbered one Ornette Coleman, who would go on to push jazz to the limits of abstraction in the next decade.

By the end of the ‘50s, the burdens -- financial and otherwise -- of running the inn and school and promoting the concerts had grown unbearable, and the Barbers -- who in the meantime were converting the adjacent cottage, Wheatleigh, into the grand hotel it is today -- sold the Music Inn to Don Soviero. While the place would continue to host concerts -- jazz and folk in the ‘60s, primarily rock in the ‘70s -- a small but vital chapter in the history of jazz in America came to a close.

With many of the veterans of that era gone -- the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk all performed at Music Inn -- and the remaining few getting on in age, the source material for this chapter is in danger of being lost.

This is where development director Stan Rosen, the official heading up the Music Inn project, sees the National Music Foundation playing a key role.

“This fits in exactly with our mission to preserve American music,” said Rosen in a recent phone interview from the foundation’s Lenox headquarters. “In the last several weeks as I’ve planned this event I’ve run across an incredible amount of important memorabilia in peoples’ drawers and basements and scrapbooks, and if we don’t do something quickly to organize and preserve this important legacy it will be gone.”

To address the situation, the foundation is seeking to raise funds to establish a permanent home for Music Inn memorabilia and to amass a clearinghouse for all existing scholarly and journalistic accounts. At some point, an exhibition will be mounted to tell the story of Music Inn and explain its historic role in supporting and perpetuating jazz music.

“So far we’ve been able to idenitfy photos, recordings and printed materials out there,” said Rosen. “We’ve heard about some home movies. Also we’re aware that there have been books and articles and research about the Music Inn days, all of which should be consolidated into a single location for future researchers.”

By gathering together so many veterans of Music Inn in one place and having them pay tribute in words and music to the inn’s legacy, Saturday night’s event could become part of the historical record, and as such will be recorded for posterity. The evening’s activities are expected to conclude with a private, post-concert get-together at the foundation’s Springlawn mansion which holds the potential for an historic, all-star jam session, what with Rollins, Brubeck, Heath, Weston and others all expected to be on hand.

“A lot was happening up in Lenox,” said Brubeck in a 1995 interview about the Music Inn days. “The boundaries of jazz were being stretched up there.” The hope is that a little bit of that magic will be recreated on Saturday night.

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on August 21, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]