PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Berkshire County is jazz, said Chuck Walker, the newly appointed president of the nonprofit Berkshire Jazz. 

 

Jazz embodies freedom way of thinking, improvisation, and a distant respect for the rules, Berkshires Jazz founder Ed Bride said. 

 

It is an emotional refuge from today's atmosphere. The Berkshires, too, is like that, a place to escape and clear your head, which is why so many artists over the years have visited the area, the duo said. 

 

"You need a place to escape from that in order to, as we all used to say back in the '60s, to get your head right. The Berkshires are a place where you can get your head right," Walker said. 

 

"The way that you just described jazz as improvisational … as being out of lockstep with  whatever the prevailing society is. That's what makes jazz jazz. That, too, is what makes the Berkshires the Berkshires." 

 

For the last 20 years, Bride has been rejuvenating jazz in the Berkshires, a genre that was once alive thanks to venues such as Music Inn and The Lenox School of Jazz, sometimes called the Music Barn, active from 1950 until the late '70s. 

 

Bride said when he started the Pittsfield City Jazz Festival in 2005, which became the Berkshires Jazz nonprofit in 2009, you could go months without hearing jazz, with only one place in the county that would regularly play it: Castle Street Café in Great Barrington, which closed in 2016.