Welcome to a new edition of the Neon Jazz Interview Series featuring cultural historian, educator, and author John Gennari.
We dive into his 2025 book The Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life.
Dr. Gennari is a Professor of English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont and an American Studies–trained U.S. cultural historian specializing in jazz and popular music, race and ethnicity, Italian American culture, food, sports, and cultural criticism. He is also the author of the 2017 book Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge.
In this conversation, we explore how a small New England town — Lenox, Massachusetts — became an unlikely home for jazz in the 1950s. The Jazz Barn chronicles the story of the Music Inn in the Berkshire Hills, where a barn, icehouse, and greenhouse were transformed into a groundbreaking cultural hub for performances, seminars, and cross-cultural exchange.
Set against the backdrop of McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, and postwar tourism, this story challenges assumptions about race and place, art and geography, and the relationship between rural landscapes and urban jazz culture.
This is an essential conversation for anyone interested in jazz history, American cultural studies, race and music, and the evolution of jazz in America.
📚 Get John Gennari’s books here:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/John-Gennari/author/B001HD13RS?ref=ap_rdr&shoppingPortalEnabled=true&ccs_id=ccd9f68d-c8af-4cc6-8fd6-2eb7952af8ca
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