Lee — The Berkshire Gateway Jazz Weekend, June 9 through 11, serves two purposes: firstly, to showcase live jazz music in the Berkshires and, secondly, to celebrate the town of Lee, known to tourists, cartographers, and cannabis connoisseurs as the Gateway to the Berkshires. That’s why Berkshires Jazz Inc., promoting the event in collaboration with Gateway Preservation Inc., likes to mention the names of popular lodging and dining establishments in materials promoting the festival.
It’s the perfect match: Berkshires Jazz wants to preserve jazz music in America, and Gateway Preservation wants to preserve historic structures in downtown Lee (e.g., Lee Congregational Church) for use in educational programs and as performing arts venues.
Professor of Music at Boston University Jeremy Yudkin wrote the book on jazz in the Berkshires, “The Lenox School of Jazz: A Vital Chapter in the History of American Music and Race Relations.” Jeremy is the guy to ask about the history of jazz music in the Berkshires and how the Berkshire Gateway Jazz Weekend fits in. So I did ask, and here is what he told me:
“It is a treat to have the Berkshire Gateway Jazz Weekend every year in the Berkshires. The Berkshires have played an important role in the history of jazz and jazz education in America. In the 1950s the Lenox School of Jazz operated out of the Music Inn, a cultural resort located where White Pines Condominium now stands. It was a revolutionary concept: a place (the Music Inn), just down the road from Tanglewood, that hosted the great jazz performers of the day (Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Count Basie, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and many others; and a school (The Lenox School of Jazz) where young people, mostly white, learned from a distinguished faculty of performers, both Black and white (John Lewis, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Max Roach, and others) in a serious atmosphere of respect and engagement.”
(Jeremy’s book sold out its first printing and is now in the “collectible” category, but the Lenox Library Association has expressed their hope to reprint it.)
The Berkshires continue to attract top jazz talent. Recent offerings have included Randy Weston, Sonny Rollins, Ahmad Jamal, Grace Kelly (no longer classified as up-and-coming), Phil Woods, T.S. Monk, Dr. Billy Taylor, Ted Rosenthal, and innumerable others.
On June 9, the Gateway Jazz Weekend headline act will be jazz-blues stylist Roberta Donnay with the Prohibition Mob Band. All About Jazz describes Donnay as “a Jazz Age preservationist, guardian of Depression-era sounds, and extender of traditions,” but quickly adds that “her music isn’t covered with cobwebs or dated in any way.” The magazine describes Donnay as “that rare species of musician who almost lives in another time, as she and her Prohibition Mob Band exist to revive the Jazz Age of America.”
In 2015, Downbeat Magazine wrote, “Roberta Donnay has a silky, clean voice that is a small marvel of geniality, rarely dipping into touchy-feely cuteness. She’s drawn to material from the canon of American songs recorded between the two world wars. All the while, the well-groomed, jazz-inclined Prohibition Mob Band motors along spiritedly.”
Downbeat Magazine has also had complimentary things to say about the June 10 headliner, Alexis Cole, who will appear with the Amherst Jazz Orchestra. After hearing her live performance, the magazine pointed to Cole’s “confident understanding of how to interpret music in a manner that enthralls an audience.” But that only begins to tell the story of Alexis Cole’s musicianship. She is so good at scat singing that her own band members have been seen on stage shaking their heads in amazement.
Even more amazing is the story of Cole’s stint as lead singer of West Point’s Jazz Knights Big Band, a gig she successfully auditioned for prior to enlisting in the U.S. Army and serving as Staff Sergeant for two tours of duty while gigging at night in New York City. Can you imagine being so technically accomplished as a jazz vocalist that the U.S. Army judges your singing to be of military grade? (And, honestly, I can see the Army’s point when I listen to something like this, where Cole’s precision, measure after measure, is simply staggering.)
Any aspiring scat singer would jump at the chance to learn directly from such a master as Alexis Cole. And they can do so if they are enrolled at the Conservatory of Music at SUNY Purchase College, where Cole teaches, or at Western Connecticut State University, or at her alma mater, William Paterson University. Also, she is co-founder of the annual Virginia Beach Vocal Jazz Summit. Her students have won such awards as the Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald Competitions.
Hear Roberta Donnay and the Prohibition Mob Band, Alexis Cole with the Amherst Jazz Orchestra, two jazz brunches, and more at Berkshire Gateway Jazz Weekend in downtown Lee, June 9 through 11. Tickets are available here, at Lee Congregational Church, or by calling (413) 243-1033.
