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Please join us for a special preview of Music Inn at the Berkshire International Film Festival before the screening of
Kokoyakyu on Sunday 14 May 2006, at 2pm. The film's producers will be in attendance.
In Lenox, Massachusetts, between 1951 and 1960 at a place called Music Inn, there was a turning point in the history of music in America.
Under the stewardship of Stephanie and Philip Barber Music Inn began with informal jazz and folk "Roundtables" and "Workshops" of scholars and critics, and culminated in the first
School of Jazz -- where students learned from and performed with accomplished masters. Frequent participation of students and performers from nearby Tanglewood stimulated cross-fertilization
between classical music and jazz. Music Inn was an undeniable force in the emergence of jazz from crowded urban clubs into concert halls. Louis Armstrong remarked in 1953, "They're doing
wonderful things up there. They're really helping make music history."
Noted participants at Music Inn included Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Guthrie, Geoffrey Holder, Langston Hughes, Mahalia Jackson,
Tom Lehrer, John Lewis, Babatunde Olatunji, Oscar Peterson, Max Roach, George Russell, Gunther Schuller, Pete Seeger and Randy Weston. The list of performers of the Music Barn constituted a
virtual who's who of now world-renowned musicians.
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