Jazz legends pay tribute to Stephanie Barber, Music Inn
by Seth Rogovoy

(LENOX , Mass., Aug. 23, 1998) -- There was reminiscing, celebrating and a bit of reliving the feeling and spirit of Music Inn on Saturday night, when veterans of the Lenox institution’s jazz heyday in the ‘50s paid tribute to co-founders Stephanie Barber and her late husband Philip for their groundbreaking experiment, which for a brief time put jazz music on a par with classical in the Berkshires.

Musicians including Dave Brubeck, Randy Weston and Percy Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet were on hand along with about 180 guests at a fund-raising dinner at the National Music Foundation’s Center Theatre to applaud the legacy of Music Inn and the School of Jazz founded there in the late-‘50s. The event officially launched an effort to establish a permanent archive of Music Inn-related memorabilia at the foundation, with the eventual goal of mounting an exhibition to tell the story of Music Inn.

The dinner, a three-hour affair preceding a concert by Sonny Rollins -- another veteran of the Music Inn -- featured first-hand testimonials, anecdotes, and an all-star, impromptu jam session featuring several of the musicians on hand, including Brubeck, Heath, Weston, Cuban percussionist Candido and bassist Sam Gill.

After the Rollins concert, the celebration continued at the foundation’s Springlawn mansion, where about a hundred invited guests and contributors enjoyed a post-midnight jam session featuring Weston, Heath, Gill and Cecil Payne on baritone saxophone.

“It was a real nice clambake,” said Stephanie Barber yesterday. “I was moved by the fact that so many loving musicians came and I was moved also by the presence of the absent, my favorite people whose photographs flashed for a moment on the screen.

“I was a little embarrassed to be the focus of so much attention, but I am grateful to the music foundation for the tribute paid not to me but to the people who made the Music Inn a singular and loving experience.”

As the guest of honor, Barber, of Lenox, was the recipient of voluminous thanks for her role in creating and perpetuating Music Inn, which Sam Gill told the crowd “put jazz in proper perspective … an incredible thing for its time.”

Barber repaid the tributes with a thank-you sung to the tune of “Thanks For the Memories,” with new lyrics penned by Tom Lehrer and Barber’s stepson, the political pundit and speechwriter Benjamin Barber.

Foundation development director Stan Rosen, who organized the tribute, said at the end of the night, “We couldn’t be happier. I suppose we could have used a shoehorn to get more people in.” Rosen said that with contributions still coming in and bills yet to be paid he couldn’t yet say how much money was raised for the Music Inn project.

Seated at the dais for the testimonial portion of the evening was a sprinkling of musicians and musicologists, resonant of the famed jazz roundtables held at Music Inn in the ‘50s.

Dave Brubeck, who lived at Music Inn with his family in the summer of 1959, told of receiving a crucial public endorsement by musicologist Willis James for his somewhat controversial experiments with alternative time signatures in his compositions.

“Dr. Willis James sang an African work song, and then he asked everyone if they knew what time signature it was in,” said Brubeck. “It was in five-four, and he said `The Dave Brubeck Quartet is on the right track,’ at a time when I was writing songs like `Take Five’ in five-four.”

Randy Weston, who penned some of his best-known material, including “Berkshire Blues,” at Music Inn, called the place “my second spiritual home after Brooklyn, New York.” Weston told of first coming to Lenox as a breakfast cook at Seven Hills -- ironically, the evening’s caterer -- and subsequently learning about the jazz roundtables taking place across town.

“Music Inn prepared me for my life,” said Weston. “It was jazz, but more than jazz -- it was the original world music.” Indicative of his loyalty and dedication to Barber, Weston reportedly flew non-stop from Vienna, where he performed on Friday night, connecting at London and JFK airport in New York, from where he chartered a single-engine plane to Pittsfield, arriving at the foundation’s headquarters by 6:30, just in time to take his seat on the dais.

Injecting some levity into the proceedings, Cecil Payne said, “The food was so good I weighed 240 pounds,” provoking some knowing chuckles from his peers. Payne also told a riotously funny story about a pickup baseball game at Music Inn, with Payne, Weston and a few others facing off against members of the Modern Jazz Quartet, who were in residence at the Inn for several summers. The punch line involved Payne stretching a base hit into a home run, with MJQ drummer Connie Kay, playing catcher, paying the price of a broken hand for Payne’s aggressive baserunning.

Lenox native John Gennari, who now teaches at the University of Virginia, spoke of his research at the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, where he uncovered a cache of documents belonging to the late Marshall Stearns, the jazz historian who in many ways was the visionary behind Music Inn. Gennari’s upcoming book, “Canonizing Jazz” -- which will look at jazz as the great American art form -- includes a chapter dealing with the School of Jazz.

Philip Barber’s son Benjamin paid particular tribute to the avant-garde nature of Music Inn’s racial politics, pointing out that black and white were mixing freely on the Lenox campus before such signal moments in American racial history as the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and the civil rights movement of the ‘60s.

“At Music Inn, it wasn’t about black and white, but blue, as in the blues,” said Barber, who grew up on the grounds of Music Inn. “Jazz helped desegregate America, and as a result helped civilize it.”

Bill Russo, who was on the faculty at the School of Jazz, recounted the history of Music Inn, and read written tributes to Barber sent by record company executive Ahmet Ertegun, pianist/composer John Lewis, clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, and jazz critic Nat Hentoff.

During dinner, a slide show featuring photographs by such well-known Berkshire photographers as Warren Fowler, Bill Tague and Clemens Kalischer flashed images of such musical greats as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Mahalia Jackson, all of whom strode the grounds and appeared on the stage at Music Inn.

Although he was not in attendance at the tribute dinner, Sonny Rollins recognized Stephanie Barber from the stage during his show, dedicating his concert to her.

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on August 24, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]