The story of how jazz came to the Berkshires is, like so many jazz stories, partly about money and mostly about belief.

In 1955, a music critic and educator named Marshall Stearns — author of The Story of Jazz (1956), founder of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers — helped establish the School of Jazz at Music Inn, a resort on Route 183 in Lenox, Massachusetts, a few miles from Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The setup was deliberate: jazz, which had spent most of its existence being treated as either entertainment or sociology, was going to be taken seriously as an art form in the same hills where serious music was already taken seriously.

The faculty and students who descended on Lenox each August in the late 1950s made the school a pivot point in jazz education history. John Lewis, the pianist and musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, was central to its operation. He believed that jazz deserved the same analytical attention and pedagogical rigor as European classical music, and he had the connections and the conviction to make the argument stick.

In 1959, Lewis sponsored two musicians he believed needed the school: Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman.

The Coleman Enrollment

Ornette Coleman arrived at Lenox in the summer of 1959 having spent years being rejected by the Los Angeles jazz establishment. His approach — abandoning chord changes, pursuing what he called “harmolodic” improvisation, playing an alto saxophone made of plastic that serious musicians found vaguely embarrassing — had made him an outcast in exactly the circles where he most wanted to be heard.

At Lenox, for the first time, he found musicians who were willing to take him seriously. He studied, played, and made connections that would lead directly to his November residency at the Five Spot in New York, the engagement that divided the jazz world and launched free jazz as a force in the music. Without Lenox, that residency might not have happened. Without Lewis’s sponsorship, Coleman might never have gotten to Lenox.

The historian John Gennari, whose 2025 book The Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life excavates this history in detail, has described the Berkshires as “a crucial space for the performance, study, and mainstreaming of jazz, and eventually an epicenter of the genre’s avant-garde.” The word “crucial” does not feel like an overstatement.

What Music Inn Was

Music Inn was a resort before it was a jazz venue — a Berkshires inn that had been converting itself, through the 1950s, into a center for the arts and for serious intellectual life. The owners, Stephanie and Philip Barber, had a vision that jazz could be discussed and studied with the same seriousness as any other art, and they built a context around that vision: formal concerts, informal jam sessions, seminars and lectures, a community of musicians, critics, and enthusiasts who gathered in the hills every summer and argued about music with a passion that was possible, perhaps, only because they were away from the commercial pressures of New York.

The musicians who passed through Lenox in those years constitute something like a roster of everyone who mattered. Miles Davis. Charles Mingus. Dizzy Gillespie. Modern jazz musicians who were at the height of their powers, alongside younger musicians who were beginning to question whether those powers were pointing in the right direction.

Coleman’s enrollment was significant not just for what it did for him but for what it said about the school’s culture. Lewis was sponsoring a musician who almost nobody else would sponsor, taking a bet on someone whose music was making jazz’s establishment genuinely uncomfortable. The fact that the Berkshire context gave Coleman space to develop — to be heard, to be taken seriously, to make the connections that would get him to New York — is an argument for exactly the kind of institution Stearns and the Barbers were trying to build.

The Longer Tradition

The Berkshires had been absorbing unconventional artists for over a century by the time jazz arrived. Hawthorne wrote in the hills above Lenox. Melville wrote Moby-Dick while living at Arrowhead. Edith Wharton built the Mount in Lenox and entertained Henry James there. Tanglewood brought serious music to the mountains in the 1930s and made the region a destination for people who believed that the arts were worth taking seriously in their own right.

Jazz, as it arrived in Lenox in 1955, was claiming its place in that tradition. The argument wasn’t that jazz was as good as European classical music — that framing conceded too much. The argument was that jazz was its own thing, with its own history, its own standards, its own capacity for depth and complexity, and that it deserved to be taken on those terms.

Gennari’s book recovers a story that has been largely forgotten — the Berkshires chapter of jazz history is not taught alongside Newport or the Village Vanguard, though it arguably belongs in that company. The musicians who gathered at Lenox each August were not just playing; they were building an argument about what the music was and what it deserved. Coleman’s Five Spot residency, which changed jazz in November 1959, was made possible by a summer in the mountains where someone finally listened.