Jazz lovers will relish this exploration of a crucial place in jazz’s development.
How jazz found a new audience in the Berkshires.
In 1950 a well-off married couple, Philip and Stephanie Barber, opened Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, a historically white area of deep cultural significance. They later fashioned a carriage house as a performance center for all kinds of music, lectures, and tutorials grounded in the Lenox School of Jazz. A “wellspring of American vernacular music” was born with first-class musicians like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Stan Getz, and the Modern Jazz Quartet during a powerful postwar movement for racial equality. Lenox is Gennari’s hometown, and in this book, the University of Vermont professor writes of “learning to see jazz, the Berkshires, race, culture, and America itself in new ways.” After providing some historical background about the region, Gennari notes that jazz “may be singular in the strength of its attachment to place…and movement.” For Black “jazz pianist and Brooklynite Randy Weston, Lenox figured as nothing less than a life-defining experience.” He got a job at Music Inn and was encouraged to play piano in the front lounge. Jazz writer Marshall Stearns created influential jazz roundtables showcasing Black artists and writers and was a founder of the School of Jazz. Music Inn’s opening event featured folk singers Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie while still fostering blues, African, and Afro-Caribbean music. Gennari writes about eminent photographer Clemens Kalischer, whose photos of many Music Inn participants are included throughout the book. In time, Music Inn’s musical performances “mediated between the local and the national.” The author profiles a number of the jazz school’s outstanding students, including Ran Blake, Ornette Coleman, and Don Cherry. Dave Brubeck’s Time Out and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, among other albums, all had a “deep connection to Music Inn.” Its liberal and multicultural ideology was key to the changes in jazz music throughout the pulsating 1950s.
Jazz lovers will relish this exploration of a crucial place in jazz’s development.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781684582853
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Brandeis Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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