The Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life

How a small town in New England became a home for jazz, challenging conventional assumptions about the relationship between culture and landscape, art and geography, town and city, and race and place.

This is a book about what happened in the 1950s in a barn, an icehouse, and a greenhouse in the verdant Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Against the backdrop of McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the expansion of the Afro—Caribbean diaspora, and postwar cultural tourism, two New...