Last question first.  We came to the Berkshires as two weary New Yorkers looking for all sorts of things that couldn't be found in New York.  Things like fresh air and freedom, rugged individualism, beauty, trees and time and place for friends, for talk, for music.

We searched everywhere and decided that Berkshire County was the most pleasant place to live a civilized life in the United States.  (Most of you who are reading this think it is pretty good too, or you wouldn't be here; so we don't have to prove this point.)

Decision number one made, we came to problem two.  How to make a living?  We had lots of ideas.  Wooden toys, playhouses, and a trout hatchery.  Trout. Elegant, tasty Trout.  We investigated.  Did you know that there are 289 diseases that trout can catch - eleven of which can kill a whole hatchery's population overnight?

Okay...not trout.

What did we know about?  What did we like?

Long thoughts.

The answer:  people.  More entertaining than trout, more intelligent, more affectionate, more fun.  So, we started an Inn in this group of farm buildings that were once part of the estate of a Countess.  Tanglewood at our door, Jacob's Pillow nearby, a Bird Sanctuary, theatres, a lake, and all in the midst of beautiful unspoiled-by-signs countryside.

So there was an Inn.  Name?  Music Inn, what else?

Well, we still needed music.  What kind of music?  We have a deep feeling about symphony music, about Mozart, Beethoven, and Copeland, for instance, but Tanglewood already magnificently fills the summer with classics and it is just a walk away.

But we like other music, too - music that makes us tap our foot, music with humour, music that's new and different, music that's old, dance music, folk songs...and jazz.  You know, we're not necessarily musicians, just people who like music if it is good of its kind.

Back in the late summer of 1950 in the very first year of Music Inn, we started what was probably the first jazz (and folk) festival that had ever been held.  We called it the roundtable.  The Jazz and Folk Roundtable.

We not only had performers - from Africa - from the West Indies - from New Orleans, Chicago and New York - we had professors - anthropologists, musicologists, psychologists, semanticists - and with them we had enthusiastic morning-after discussions of what is was all about, if anything, and why I like this and why you like that.

The talk was almost as good as the music.

And this went on - in the lounge of Music Inn (capacity: 120 with the windows open).

The next year, the roundtable was two weeks long, the third year, three weeks, and by the fourth year, our accountant called a reckoning.

We had had Billy Taylor, and Ralph Sutton, and Candido, and Mahalia Jackson and Tony Scott, and Blind Sonny Terry with Brownie McGee, and Pete Seegar and jazz dancers, and Asadata Da-Fora Horton, and Macbeth the Great and a New Orleans Marching Band, and Jimmie Rushing and Sammy Price and thirty or forty other jazz and folk musicians ... not the big commercial names .... but great names just the same.  Our guests enjoyed it.  But our capacity for outside audiences was just twenty. (20!)  Our accountant frowned at us and said:  "You don't have to make money out of this, but you'd darn well better stop losing it in large gobs."

In 1955, with the accountant glowering, we moved all this Jazz out into the old courtyard of the Countess's haybarn, put in seats for siz hundred and with the help of Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Eddie Condon, launched the Music Barn.

And now we seat almost a thousand, and there are few names in the roster of the great in Jazz that haven't played here.  The ones who play here love it.  They come back year after year because they like the Berkshires, they like Music Inn, they like the acoustics...but mostly they come back becaue of you.

You are a great audience.  You understand.  You listen.  You are hip.

(We didn't say it, but they say it,  Dave and the Count and the Duke and Ella, and Sarah, and the MJQ and Gerry, and Wilbur and Chico and Marian and Billy, and Charlie and Dizzy and Ray and Oscar and Jimmy - all of them say you're great and they like to play for you.)

So it seems that you and we are in a kind of partnership.  It is your attentiveness as as appreciative and sympathetic audience that enables us to bring these jazz names to the Berkshires, and, indeed, determines the quality of the concerts.

We didn't answer, specifically, "Why Jazz?"

But you get the inference.  We're crazy about jazz.  And you?