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OT: Nat Hentoff dead at 91
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Oscar
Jan 8, 2017, 4:09:53 PM1/8/17
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Mr. Hentoff needed no introduction. The man was sui generis and irreplaceable. Rest in peace, Sir.
<< Nat Hentoff, Journalist and Social Commentator, Dies at 91
By Robert D. McFadden
January 7, 2017
Nat Hentoff, the author, journalist, jazz critic and civil libertarian who called himself a troublemaker and proved it with a shelf of books and a mountain of essays on free speech, wayward politics, elegant riffs and the sweet harmonies of the Constitution, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.
His son, Nicholas, said he died of natural causes, surrounded by family listening to Billie Holiday.
Mr. Hentoff wrote for The Village Voice for 50 years, and also contributed to The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Down Beat magazine and dozens of other publications. He wrote more than 35 books — novels, volumes for young adults and nonfiction works on civil liberties, education and other subjects.
The Hentoff bibliotheca reads almost like an anthology: works by a jazz aficionado, a mystery writer, an eyewitness to history, an educational reformer, a political agitator, a foe of censors, a social critic. He was, indeed — like the jazz he loved — given to improvisations and permutations, a composer-performer who lived comfortably with his contradictions, though adversaries called him shallow and unscrupulous, and even his admirers sometimes found him infuriating, unrealistic and stubborn.
In the 1950s, Mr. Hentoff was a jazz critic in Manhattan, frequenting crowded, smoky nightclubs where musicians played for low pay and audiences ran hot and cold and dreamy. “I knew their flaws as well as their strengths,” he recalled, referring to the jazz artists whose music he loved, many of whom he befriended, “but I continued to admire the honesty and courage of their art.”
In the 1960s and ’70s, he wrote books for young adults, nonfiction on education, magazine profiles on political and religious leaders and essays on racial conflicts and the Vietnam War. He became an activist, too, befriending Malcolm X and joining peace protests and marches for racial equality.
In the 1980s and ’90s, he produced commentaries and books on censorship and other constitutional issues; murder mysteries; portraits of educators and judges; and an avalanche of articles on abortion, civil liberties and other issues. He also wrote a volume of memoirs, “Speaking Freely” (1997).
His writing was often passionate, even inspirational. Much of it was based on personal observations, but some critics said it was not deeply researched or analytic. His nonfiction took in the sweep of an era of war and social upheaval, while many of his novels caught the turbulence, if not the character, of politically astute young adults.
While his sympathies were usually libertarian, he often infuriated leftist friends with his opposition to abortion, his attacks on political correctness and his criticisms of gay groups, feminists, blacks and others he accused of trying to censor opponents. He relished the role of provocateur, defending the right of people to say and write whatever they wanted, even if it involved racial slurs, apartheid and pornography.
He had a firebrand’s face: wreathed in a gray beard and a shock of unruly hair, with dark, uncompromising eyes. Once a student asked what made him tick. “Rage,” he replied. But he said it softly, and friends recalled that his invective, in print or in person, usually came wrapped in gentle good humor and respectful tones.
Nathan Irving Hentoff was born in Boston on June 10, 1925, the son of Simon and Lena Katzenberg Hentoff. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and he grew up in the tough Roxbury section in a vortex of political debate among socialists, anarchists, Communists, Trotskyites and other revolutionaries. He learned early how to rebel.
On Yom Kippur in 1937, the Day of Atonement and fasting, the 12-year-old Nat sat on his porch on a street leading to a synagogue and slowly ate a salami sandwich. It made him sick, and the action outraged his father. He had not done it to scandalize passing Jews who glared at him, he said in a memoir, “Boston Boy” (1986). “I wanted to know how it felt to be an outcast,” he wrote. “Except for my father’s reaction and for getting sick, it turned out to be quite enjoyable.”
He attended Boston Latin, the oldest public school in America, and read voraciously. He discovered Artie Shaw and fell passionately for Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and other jazz legends. As more modern styles of jazz emerged, Mr. Hentoff also embraced musicians like Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus and, later, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor.
At Northeastern University, he became editor of a student newspaper and turned it into a muckraker. When it dug up a story about trustees backing anti-Semitic publications, the university shut it down. Mr. Hentoff and members of his staff resigned, but he graduated in 1946 with high honors and a lasting devotion to the First Amendment.
After several years with a Boston radio station, he moved to New York in 1953 and covered the jazz scene for Down Beat until 1957.
He was one of the most prolific jazz writers of the 1950s and 60s, providing liner notes for countless albums as well as writing or editing several books on jazz, including “Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It” (1955), which he edited with Nat Shapiro. It was a seminal work of oral history.
In 1958 he was a founding editor of the influential The Jazz Review, which lasted until 1961. In 1960, he began a notable if brief career as a record producer, supervising sessions by Mingus, Max Roach and others for the Candid label.
Around the same time he began a freelance career that took him into the pages of Esquire, Harper’s, Commonweal, The Reporter, Playboy and The New York Herald Tribune.
In 1958, he began writing for The Village Voice, the counterculture weekly. It became a 50-year gig, despite changes of ownership and editorial direction. Veering from jazz, he wrote weekly columns on civil liberties, politics, education, capital punishment and other topics, all widely syndicated to newspapers.
In January 2009, he was laid off by The Voice, but said he would continue to bang away on the electric typewriter in his cluttered Greenwich Village flat, producing articles for United Features and Jewish World Review and reflections on jazz and other music for The Wall Street Journal.
Citing the late journalists George Seldes and I.F. Stone as his muses, he promised in a farewell Voice column to continue “putting on my skunk suit at other garden parties.”
He wrote for The New Yorker from 1960 to 1986, and for The Washington Post from 1984 to 2000. He also wrote for The Washington Times and other publications. For years he lectured at schools and colleges and was on the faculties of New York University and the New School.
Mr. Hentoff’s first book, “The Jazz Life” (1961), examined social and psychological aspects of jazz. Later came “Peace Agitator: The Story of A. J. Muste” (1963), a biography of the pacifist, and “The New Equality” (1964), on the role of white guilt in racial reforms.
“Jazz Country” (1965) was the first of a series of novels for young adults. It explored the struggles of a young white musician breaking into the black jazz scene. Others included “This School Is Driving Me Crazy” (1976), “Does This School Have Capital Punishment?” (1981) and “The Day They Came to Arrest the Book” (1982). They addressed subjects like the military draft, censorship and the generation gap, but some critics called them polemics in the mouths of characters.
Many of Mr. Hentoff’s later books dealt with the Constitution and those who interpreted and acted on it. In “Living the Bill of Rights” (1998), he profiled the Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, the educator Kenneth Clark and others as he explored capital punishment, prayer in schools, funding for education, race relations and other issues.
In “Free Speech for Me — But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other” (1992), he attacked not only school boards that banned books but also feminists who tried to silence abortion foes or close pornographic bookstores; gay rights groups that boycotted Florida orange juice because its spokeswoman, Anita Bryant, crusaded against gay people; and New York officials who tried to bar South Africa’s rugby team because it represented the land of apartheid.
In 1995, Mr. Hentoff received the National Press Foundation’s award for lifetime achievement in contributions to journalism, and in 2004 he was named one of six Jazz Masters by the National Endowment for the Arts, the first non-musician to win the honor.
Mr. Hentoff was the subject of an award-winning 2013 biographical film, “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step,” produced and directed by the journalist David L. Lewis, which played in theaters across the country.
Mr. Hentoff’s first two marriages, to Miriam Sargent in 1950 and Trudi Bernstein in 1954, ended in divorce. His third wife, the former Margo Goodman, whom he married in 1959, is a columnist and author of essays, reviews and short stories.
Besides his wife and son Nicholas, he is survived by two daughters, Jessica and Miranda, a son, Thomas; a stepdaughter, Mara Wolynski Nierman; a sister, Janet Krauss, and 10 grandchildren. >>
<< Nat Hentoff, Journalist and Social Commentator, Dies at 91
By Robert D. McFadden
January 7, 2017
Nat Hentoff, the author, journalist, jazz critic and civil libertarian who called himself a troublemaker and proved it with a shelf of books and a mountain of essays on free speech, wayward politics, elegant riffs and the sweet harmonies of the Constitution, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.
His son, Nicholas, said he died of natural causes, surrounded by family listening to Billie Holiday.
Mr. Hentoff wrote for The Village Voice for 50 years, and also contributed to The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Down Beat magazine and dozens of other publications. He wrote more than 35 books — novels, volumes for young adults and nonfiction works on civil liberties, education and other subjects.
The Hentoff bibliotheca reads almost like an anthology: works by a jazz aficionado, a mystery writer, an eyewitness to history, an educational reformer, a political agitator, a foe of censors, a social critic. He was, indeed — like the jazz he loved — given to improvisations and permutations, a composer-performer who lived comfortably with his contradictions, though adversaries called him shallow and unscrupulous, and even his admirers sometimes found him infuriating, unrealistic and stubborn.
In the 1950s, Mr. Hentoff was a jazz critic in Manhattan, frequenting crowded, smoky nightclubs where musicians played for low pay and audiences ran hot and cold and dreamy. “I knew their flaws as well as their strengths,” he recalled, referring to the jazz artists whose music he loved, many of whom he befriended, “but I continued to admire the honesty and courage of their art.”
In the 1960s and ’70s, he wrote books for young adults, nonfiction on education, magazine profiles on political and religious leaders and essays on racial conflicts and the Vietnam War. He became an activist, too, befriending Malcolm X and joining peace protests and marches for racial equality.
In the 1980s and ’90s, he produced commentaries and books on censorship and other constitutional issues; murder mysteries; portraits of educators and judges; and an avalanche of articles on abortion, civil liberties and other issues. He also wrote a volume of memoirs, “Speaking Freely” (1997).
His writing was often passionate, even inspirational. Much of it was based on personal observations, but some critics said it was not deeply researched or analytic. His nonfiction took in the sweep of an era of war and social upheaval, while many of his novels caught the turbulence, if not the character, of politically astute young adults.
While his sympathies were usually libertarian, he often infuriated leftist friends with his opposition to abortion, his attacks on political correctness and his criticisms of gay groups, feminists, blacks and others he accused of trying to censor opponents. He relished the role of provocateur, defending the right of people to say and write whatever they wanted, even if it involved racial slurs, apartheid and pornography.
He had a firebrand’s face: wreathed in a gray beard and a shock of unruly hair, with dark, uncompromising eyes. Once a student asked what made him tick. “Rage,” he replied. But he said it softly, and friends recalled that his invective, in print or in person, usually came wrapped in gentle good humor and respectful tones.
Nathan Irving Hentoff was born in Boston on June 10, 1925, the son of Simon and Lena Katzenberg Hentoff. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and he grew up in the tough Roxbury section in a vortex of political debate among socialists, anarchists, Communists, Trotskyites and other revolutionaries. He learned early how to rebel.
On Yom Kippur in 1937, the Day of Atonement and fasting, the 12-year-old Nat sat on his porch on a street leading to a synagogue and slowly ate a salami sandwich. It made him sick, and the action outraged his father. He had not done it to scandalize passing Jews who glared at him, he said in a memoir, “Boston Boy” (1986). “I wanted to know how it felt to be an outcast,” he wrote. “Except for my father’s reaction and for getting sick, it turned out to be quite enjoyable.”
He attended Boston Latin, the oldest public school in America, and read voraciously. He discovered Artie Shaw and fell passionately for Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and other jazz legends. As more modern styles of jazz emerged, Mr. Hentoff also embraced musicians like Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus and, later, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor.
At Northeastern University, he became editor of a student newspaper and turned it into a muckraker. When it dug up a story about trustees backing anti-Semitic publications, the university shut it down. Mr. Hentoff and members of his staff resigned, but he graduated in 1946 with high honors and a lasting devotion to the First Amendment.
After several years with a Boston radio station, he moved to New York in 1953 and covered the jazz scene for Down Beat until 1957.
He was one of the most prolific jazz writers of the 1950s and 60s, providing liner notes for countless albums as well as writing or editing several books on jazz, including “Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It” (1955), which he edited with Nat Shapiro. It was a seminal work of oral history.
In 1958 he was a founding editor of the influential The Jazz Review, which lasted until 1961. In 1960, he began a notable if brief career as a record producer, supervising sessions by Mingus, Max Roach and others for the Candid label.
Around the same time he began a freelance career that took him into the pages of Esquire, Harper’s, Commonweal, The Reporter, Playboy and The New York Herald Tribune.
In 1958, he began writing for The Village Voice, the counterculture weekly. It became a 50-year gig, despite changes of ownership and editorial direction. Veering from jazz, he wrote weekly columns on civil liberties, politics, education, capital punishment and other topics, all widely syndicated to newspapers.
In January 2009, he was laid off by The Voice, but said he would continue to bang away on the electric typewriter in his cluttered Greenwich Village flat, producing articles for United Features and Jewish World Review and reflections on jazz and other music for The Wall Street Journal.
Citing the late journalists George Seldes and I.F. Stone as his muses, he promised in a farewell Voice column to continue “putting on my skunk suit at other garden parties.”
He wrote for The New Yorker from 1960 to 1986, and for The Washington Post from 1984 to 2000. He also wrote for The Washington Times and other publications. For years he lectured at schools and colleges and was on the faculties of New York University and the New School.
Mr. Hentoff’s first book, “The Jazz Life” (1961), examined social and psychological aspects of jazz. Later came “Peace Agitator: The Story of A. J. Muste” (1963), a biography of the pacifist, and “The New Equality” (1964), on the role of white guilt in racial reforms.
“Jazz Country” (1965) was the first of a series of novels for young adults. It explored the struggles of a young white musician breaking into the black jazz scene. Others included “This School Is Driving Me Crazy” (1976), “Does This School Have Capital Punishment?” (1981) and “The Day They Came to Arrest the Book” (1982). They addressed subjects like the military draft, censorship and the generation gap, but some critics called them polemics in the mouths of characters.
Many of Mr. Hentoff’s later books dealt with the Constitution and those who interpreted and acted on it. In “Living the Bill of Rights” (1998), he profiled the Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, the educator Kenneth Clark and others as he explored capital punishment, prayer in schools, funding for education, race relations and other issues.
In “Free Speech for Me — But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other” (1992), he attacked not only school boards that banned books but also feminists who tried to silence abortion foes or close pornographic bookstores; gay rights groups that boycotted Florida orange juice because its spokeswoman, Anita Bryant, crusaded against gay people; and New York officials who tried to bar South Africa’s rugby team because it represented the land of apartheid.
In 1995, Mr. Hentoff received the National Press Foundation’s award for lifetime achievement in contributions to journalism, and in 2004 he was named one of six Jazz Masters by the National Endowment for the Arts, the first non-musician to win the honor.
Mr. Hentoff was the subject of an award-winning 2013 biographical film, “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step,” produced and directed by the journalist David L. Lewis, which played in theaters across the country.
Mr. Hentoff’s first two marriages, to Miriam Sargent in 1950 and Trudi Bernstein in 1954, ended in divorce. His third wife, the former Margo Goodman, whom he married in 1959, is a columnist and author of essays, reviews and short stories.
Besides his wife and son Nicholas, he is survived by two daughters, Jessica and Miranda, a son, Thomas; a stepdaughter, Mara Wolynski Nierman; a sister, Janet Krauss, and 10 grandchildren. >>
Oscar
Jan 8, 2017, 4:21:06 PM1/8/17
to
The above obit ^^^ is from The New York Times.
From The Times of Israel http://bit.ly/2i7Zikz
<< Columnist Nat Hentoff, a secular rabbi excommunicated for his activism, dies at 91
Noted iconoclast, who made a name for himself as a jazz writer and radical, once said his heresy was a Jewish ‘tradition’
By Hillel Italie
January 8, 2017
NEW YORK (AP) — Nat Hentoff, an eclectic columnist, critic, novelist and agitator dedicated to music, free expression and defying the party line, died Saturday at age 91.
His son, Tom Hentoff, said his father died from natural causes at his Manhattan apartment.
Schooled in the classics and the stories he heard from Duke Ellington and other jazz greats, Nat Hentoff enjoyed a diverse and iconoclastic career, basking in “the freedom to be infuriating on a myriad of subjects.”
He was a bearded, scholarly figure, a kind of secular rabbi, as likely to write a column about fiddler Bob Wills as a dissection of the Patriot Act, to have his name appear in the liberal Village Voice as the far-right WorldNetDaily.com, where his column last appeared in August 2016.
Ellington, Charlie Parker, Malcolm X and I.F. Stone were among his friends and acquaintances. He wrote liner notes for records by Aretha Franklin, Max Roach and Ray Charles and was the first non-musician named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts. He also received honors from the American Bar Association, the National Press Foundation, and, because of his opposition to abortion, the Human Life Foundation.
Hentoff’s steadiest job was with the Voice, where he worked for 50 years and wrote a popular column. He wrote for years about jazz for DownBeat and had a music column for the Wall Street Journal. His more than 25 books included works on jazz and the First Amendment, the novels “Call the Keeper” and “Blues for Charles Darwin” and the memoirs “Boston Boy” and “Speaking Freely.”
The documentary “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step: Notes on the Life of Nat Hentoff” was released in 2014.
Jazz was his first love, but Hentoff was an early admirer of Bob Dylan, first hearing the then-unknown singer at a Greenwich Village club in 1961 and getting on well enough with him to write liner notes two years later for Dylan’s landmark second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”
“The irrepressible reality of Bob Dylan is a compound of spontaneity, candor, slicing wit and an uncommonly perceptive eye and ear for the way many of us constrict our capacity for living while a few of us don’t,” Hentoff wrote.
At a time when the media alternately treated Dylan like a prophet or the latest teen fad, Hentoff asked well-informed questions that were (usually) answered in kind by the cryptic star. Hentoff also was willing to be Dylan’s partner in improvisation. A 1966 Playboy interview, he later revealed, had been made up from scratch after Dylan rejected the first conversation that was supposed to be published by the magazine.
As a columnist, Hentoff focused tirelessly on the Constitution and what he saw as a bipartisan mission to undermine it. He tallied the crimes of Richard Nixon and labeled President Clinton’s anti-terrorism legislation “an all-out assault on the Bill of Rights.” He even parted from other First Amendment advocates, quitting the American Civil Liberties Union because of the ACLU’s support for speech codes in schools and workplaces.
Left-wing enough to merit an FBI file, an activist from age 15 when he organized a union at a Boston candy chain, Hentoff was deeply opposed to abortion, angering many of his colleagues at the Village Voice and elsewhere. In 2008, he turned against the campaign of Barack Obama over what he regarded as the candidate’s extreme views, including rejection of legislation that would have banned partial birth abortions.
Hentoff was born in 1925, the son of a Russian-Jewish haberdasher. Thrown out of Hebrew school, he flaunted his unbelief, even eating a salami sandwich in front of his house on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of fasting and atonement. In 1982, his opposition to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon led to a trio of rabbis declaring he had been excommunicated.
“I only wished the three rabbis really had the authority to hold that court,” Hentoff later wrote. “I would have told them about my life as a heretic, a tradition I keep precisely because I am a Jew.”
He was educated as a boy at Boston’s Latin School, alma mater to Ralph Waldo Emerson among others. But his best lessons were received at a local jazz joint, where Ben Webster and Rex Stewart were among those who took a liking to the teenage fan and became, Hentoff recalled, “my itinerant foster fathers.” Back in the classroom, Hentoff would hide jazz magazines inside his textbooks.
In college, Northeastern University, Hentoff found a home at the Savoy Cafe and befriended Ellington, drummer Jo Jones and others. Ellington not only lectured him on music, but enlightened young Hentoff (who eventually married three times) on the loopholes in monogamy. “Nobody likes to be owned,” Ellington told him.
After graduating, Hentoff worked as a disc jockey and moved to New York to edit DownBeat, from which he was fired in 1957, because, he alleged, he had attempted to employ an African-American writer. A year later, he joined the Village Voice and remained until he was laid off in December 2008.
“I came here in 1958 because I wanted a place where I could write freely on anything I cared about,” Hentoff wrote in his final Voice column, published in January 2009. “Over the years, my advice to new and aspiring reporters is to remember what Tom Wicker, a first-class professional spelunker, then at The New York Times, said in a tribute to Izzy Stone: ‘He never lost his sense of rage.’ Neither have I.”
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. >>
From The Times of Israel http://bit.ly/2i7Zikz
<< Columnist Nat Hentoff, a secular rabbi excommunicated for his activism, dies at 91
Noted iconoclast, who made a name for himself as a jazz writer and radical, once said his heresy was a Jewish ‘tradition’
By Hillel Italie
January 8, 2017
NEW YORK (AP) — Nat Hentoff, an eclectic columnist, critic, novelist and agitator dedicated to music, free expression and defying the party line, died Saturday at age 91.
His son, Tom Hentoff, said his father died from natural causes at his Manhattan apartment.
Schooled in the classics and the stories he heard from Duke Ellington and other jazz greats, Nat Hentoff enjoyed a diverse and iconoclastic career, basking in “the freedom to be infuriating on a myriad of subjects.”
He was a bearded, scholarly figure, a kind of secular rabbi, as likely to write a column about fiddler Bob Wills as a dissection of the Patriot Act, to have his name appear in the liberal Village Voice as the far-right WorldNetDaily.com, where his column last appeared in August 2016.
Ellington, Charlie Parker, Malcolm X and I.F. Stone were among his friends and acquaintances. He wrote liner notes for records by Aretha Franklin, Max Roach and Ray Charles and was the first non-musician named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts. He also received honors from the American Bar Association, the National Press Foundation, and, because of his opposition to abortion, the Human Life Foundation.
Hentoff’s steadiest job was with the Voice, where he worked for 50 years and wrote a popular column. He wrote for years about jazz for DownBeat and had a music column for the Wall Street Journal. His more than 25 books included works on jazz and the First Amendment, the novels “Call the Keeper” and “Blues for Charles Darwin” and the memoirs “Boston Boy” and “Speaking Freely.”
The documentary “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step: Notes on the Life of Nat Hentoff” was released in 2014.
Jazz was his first love, but Hentoff was an early admirer of Bob Dylan, first hearing the then-unknown singer at a Greenwich Village club in 1961 and getting on well enough with him to write liner notes two years later for Dylan’s landmark second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”
“The irrepressible reality of Bob Dylan is a compound of spontaneity, candor, slicing wit and an uncommonly perceptive eye and ear for the way many of us constrict our capacity for living while a few of us don’t,” Hentoff wrote.
At a time when the media alternately treated Dylan like a prophet or the latest teen fad, Hentoff asked well-informed questions that were (usually) answered in kind by the cryptic star. Hentoff also was willing to be Dylan’s partner in improvisation. A 1966 Playboy interview, he later revealed, had been made up from scratch after Dylan rejected the first conversation that was supposed to be published by the magazine.
As a columnist, Hentoff focused tirelessly on the Constitution and what he saw as a bipartisan mission to undermine it. He tallied the crimes of Richard Nixon and labeled President Clinton’s anti-terrorism legislation “an all-out assault on the Bill of Rights.” He even parted from other First Amendment advocates, quitting the American Civil Liberties Union because of the ACLU’s support for speech codes in schools and workplaces.
Left-wing enough to merit an FBI file, an activist from age 15 when he organized a union at a Boston candy chain, Hentoff was deeply opposed to abortion, angering many of his colleagues at the Village Voice and elsewhere. In 2008, he turned against the campaign of Barack Obama over what he regarded as the candidate’s extreme views, including rejection of legislation that would have banned partial birth abortions.
Hentoff was born in 1925, the son of a Russian-Jewish haberdasher. Thrown out of Hebrew school, he flaunted his unbelief, even eating a salami sandwich in front of his house on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of fasting and atonement. In 1982, his opposition to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon led to a trio of rabbis declaring he had been excommunicated.
“I only wished the three rabbis really had the authority to hold that court,” Hentoff later wrote. “I would have told them about my life as a heretic, a tradition I keep precisely because I am a Jew.”
He was educated as a boy at Boston’s Latin School, alma mater to Ralph Waldo Emerson among others. But his best lessons were received at a local jazz joint, where Ben Webster and Rex Stewart were among those who took a liking to the teenage fan and became, Hentoff recalled, “my itinerant foster fathers.” Back in the classroom, Hentoff would hide jazz magazines inside his textbooks.
In college, Northeastern University, Hentoff found a home at the Savoy Cafe and befriended Ellington, drummer Jo Jones and others. Ellington not only lectured him on music, but enlightened young Hentoff (who eventually married three times) on the loopholes in monogamy. “Nobody likes to be owned,” Ellington told him.
After graduating, Hentoff worked as a disc jockey and moved to New York to edit DownBeat, from which he was fired in 1957, because, he alleged, he had attempted to employ an African-American writer. A year later, he joined the Village Voice and remained until he was laid off in December 2008.
“I came here in 1958 because I wanted a place where I could write freely on anything I cared about,” Hentoff wrote in his final Voice column, published in January 2009. “Over the years, my advice to new and aspiring reporters is to remember what Tom Wicker, a first-class professional spelunker, then at The New York Times, said in a tribute to Izzy Stone: ‘He never lost his sense of rage.’ Neither have I.”
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. >>
number_six
Jan 10, 2017, 10:40:29 PM1/10/17
to
On Sunday, January 8, 2017 at 1:21:06 PM UTC-8, Oscar wrote:
> The above obit ^^^ is from The New York Times.
> snip <
> The above obit ^^^ is from The New York Times.
> “I came here in 1958 because I wanted a place where I could write freely on anything I cared about,” Hentoff wrote in his final Voice column, published in January 2009. “Over the years, my advice to new and aspiring reporters is to remember what Tom Wicker, a first-class professional spelunker, then at The New York Times, said in a tribute to Izzy Stone: ‘He never lost his sense of rage.’ Neither have I.”
>
Tom Wicker (I used to call him "the Wicker man") was also the author of A Time to Die, a powerful account of the Attica prison riot.
>
Oscar
Jan 21, 2017, 1:12:36 AM1/21/17
to
Another wonderful tribute to the great man. This paragraph is especially endearing:
At one point in At the Jazz Band Ball, Hentoff wrote of sometimes “feeling fraudulent” for lack of technical knowledge about, say, chord substitutions. That feeling grew more intense when his daughter, at the time a budding musician, asked, “How can you dare affect the income of a musician when you give him bad reviews since you can’t say technically what you think he’s doing wrong?” In his book, Hentoff cut to an encounter with the arranger and bandleader Gil Evans. “I’ve been reading you for years,” Evans told him, “so I know what you listen to and how you listen. I also know musicians who can tell technically everything that’s going on in a performance, but they don’t get into where this music is coming from inside the musician—the story he wants to tell. You can do that some of the time. Stop worrying."
From The Daily Beast http://thebea.st/2j4LbwJ
<< Nat Hentoff Celebrated Jazz and Freedom
The late critic tirelessly supported the improvisational genius of America’s native art form and the rights of all citizens, contrarian or not, to speak their minds.
By Larry Blumenfeld
January 20, 2016
The death of Nat Hentoff at 91 on Jan. 7 was, to me, one final act of defiance.
According to his son Nicholas, Hentoff left us in the company of that which he loved dearly—surrounded by family, listening to Billie Holiday recordings.
And I suppose that Hentoff, who wrote with as much passion and insight about the Constitution as he did about Holiday’s music, simply refused to stick around to see Donald Trump take the presidential oath of office.
I imagined Hentoff whispering something like: “I fought against the Vietnam War. I spoke out during the Reagan administration, against George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion, and in defense of true liberalism and the Bill of Rights. This fight is yours.”
As an author, journalist, jazz critic, and civil libertarian, Hentoff’s intensity was matched by his productivity and range. He inspired me early on through his voluminous essays and books. And I was lucky. I go to know the man, who, by then, had a weathered face bordered by greying hair and beard, his piercing eyes softened only by his easy smile. Hentoff was a mentor and a guiding force for me, professionally and personally. I ended up following Hentoff’s lead, straddling unlikely mastheads through my work—The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, and Truthdig, for instance—and finding jazz a particularly good vehicle through which to address social justice. After the 2005 flood in New Orleans resulting from the levee failures after Hurricane Katrina, when I described to him the extent of injustice and inequity surrounding that situation, Hentoff told me, “You have to do something, and you can’t do nothing.” Thus followed a decade of my own reporting, supporting in part by funding Hentoff helped me find. Hentoff even helped me reconcile myself with the religion from which I’d strayed, Judaism.
The most resonant voice in the pages of his book At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene is that of the chazan—the cantor in the Orthodox Jewish synagogue Hentoff attended while growing up in Boston. It’s not that Hentoff was particularly observant (he called himself “a Jewish atheist” in the book). But in shul, he found a captivating voice that provoked both visceral and intellectual responses that turned his head around, and that lasted a lifetime.
“The passionate, mesmerizing, often improvisatory singing of the chazan,” he wrote, “sounded at times as if he were arguing with God.” At 11, when Hentoff heard “music blaring from a record store that made me shout aloud in pleasure” it was clarinetist Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare.”
Regardless of whether or not that particular keening A-minor melody of Shaw’s was based on a cantorial theme (Hentoff wrote that it was), a deeper connection with the music he would come to love and document—jazz—was thus forged. The cantor’s “soul cry of human promise, transcendence and vulnerability” was the same element Hentoff would home in on within the music of, say, Charles Mingus, the “depth of his witnessing to the human condition” an unbroken link for Hentoff to the blues at jazz’s base.
Hentoff said he was an “itinerant subversive” from the start. Growing up in a then predominantly Jewish Roxbury neighborhood within an otherwise largely anti-Semitic Boston, he grew defiantly individual and developed a strong sense of social justice while still quite young. In his memoir, Boston Boy, he recalled his defining moment of rebellion at age 12—eating a large salami sandwich on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of fasting and atonement, while sitting on his family’s porch. He enjoyed not so much “that awful sandwich” as the experience of rebellion, combined with the knowledge of “how it felt to be an outcast.”
Nathan Irving Hentoff was born in Boston on June 10, 1925, the son of Simon and Lena Katzenberg Hentoff. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and the tough Roxbury section that was his home was a vortex of political debate among Socialists, anarchists, Communists, Trotskyites, and other revolutionaries. He learned early how to rebel. He channeled his sensibilities into what he used to call his “day job—reporting on keeping the Bill of Rights alive,” reflected most prominently through his 50-year tenure as a columnist for The Village Voice and via many of his books. He also developed an early love and appreciation for jazz—a music he would come to write about as a “life force.”
Within jazz’s community, Hentoff found fellow itinerant subversives, including Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Jo Jones, and Paul Desmond. “These were my teachers,” Hentoff once told me, “people who took risks every single night.” While a student at Boston Latin High School, Hentoff spent most of his free time at jazz clubs like the Savoy Café. He befriended Ellington and others, including, later on, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.
Hentoff lived through a good chunk of jazz’s history, including its heyday within American popular culture. He got into radio in Boston while still a teenager, and did broadcasts from jazz clubs such as the Savoy and George Wein’s Storyville, where he got to know many musicians, and sometimes interviewed them on-air. From the start, he was interested in the music’s context as well as its content. He moved to New York to work as an editor for Down Beat magazine, which back then appealed to a much broader readership than it does today. In 1957, together with critic Whitney Balliett, he cast “The Sound of Jazz,” a landmark CBS program that brought the likes of Billie Holiday and Lester Young and more generally the sounds and attitudes of jazz into American living rooms; Hentoff called making that show “the most important thing I’ve ever done.” He wrote liner notes to groundbreaking recordings, including John Coltrane’s Expressions and Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. As A&R director of Candid Record, he was responsible for a long list of important and unexpected albums, including We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, which still stands as one of the most overtly political of jazz classics.
Among Hentoff’s many books is 1955’s Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It, which he edited with Nat Shapiro. It was a seminal work of oral history relating to jazz. “The reason Nat Shapiro and I did that,” Hentoff told me, “was that, at the time, there was a widely held belief—really a myth—that jazz musicians are inarticulate by and large, except on their horns. There was a sense among a number of the listeners that all you have to do is pick up your horn, and you blow. And we had the idea that you could have a book where the musicians told their stories, in part to show that they could tell their stories.”
Hentoff was neither the first nor the last jazz lover to exalt the music as both metaphor and laboratory for whatever we mean when we speak of an American experiment. Ralph Ellison expressed all that with more literary distinction and greater connection to the context of African-American arts. But if Ken Burns’s 19-hour PBS series “Jazz” in 2000 offered something of a caricature of jazz as the symbol of American values and virtues, Hentoff’s body of writings has come closest to painting an honest working portrait of the idea.
I recall interviewing Hentoff years ago, when Antonin Scalia was still on the Supreme Court, about the type of jazz pedagogy Ken Burns promoted. “Well, for one thing, John Marshall—who was the first, and in some ways, the most powerful Supreme Court justice in the beginning of the 19th century—said that the Constitution is a living document,” Hentoff said. “And unlike Scalia, who keeps an 18th century dictionary to find out what the framers had in mind, jazz is the same. Sidney Bechet, in that very good memoir of his, said, ‘You can’t hold the music back.’ And that means that you can’t categorize or fix anything in the music in terms of saying, ‘Only this is jazz, and this isn’t jazz.’ And the same thing goes for the evolving Bill of Rights. You can’t talk about the fourth amendment right to privacy only in terms of what the framers said. They didn’t know about wiretaps, let along telephones.”
Among the many diverse honors bestowed upon Hentoff—from, among other organizations, the Guggenheim Foundation, The American Bar Association, the National Press Association, and the American Library Association—was his designation in 2004 as one of six Jazz Masters by the National Endowment for the Arts, the first non-musician to win the honor.
And yet one of Hentoff’s endearing qualities—one missing in most music critics and political commentators today—was real humility. At one point in At the Jazz Band Ball, Hentoff wrote of sometimes “feeling fraudulent” for lack of technical knowledge about, say, chord substitutions. That feeling grew more intense when his daughter, at the time a budding musician, asked, “How can you dare affect the income of a musician when you give him bad reviews since you can’t say technically what you think he’s doing wrong?” In his book, Hentoff cut to an encounter with the arranger and bandleader Gil Evans. “I’ve been reading you for years,” Evans told him, “so I know what you listen to and how you listen. I also know musicians who can tell technically everything that’s going on in a performance, but they don’t get into where this music is coming from inside the musician—the story he wants to tell. You can do that some of the time. Stop worrying.”
Hentoff either stopped worrying, or went ahead anyway. Without discounting the value of or need for such critical analysis based on musical knowledge—how could he?—he argued for the narrative of jazz as a succession of stories of men and women who have shaped and lived the music.
“I’ve always had the sense when I was writing,” Hentoff once told me, “especially when I was doing liner notes, of asking myself, ‘What can I say that will be of use to someone in another generation?’ When I do liner notes, I interview the musicians. When I did notes for Coltrane, we’d always go through the same ritual. I’d call up and I’d say that the record company just gave me this. And he’d say, ‘I wish you wouldn’t write the notes because if the music doesn’t speak for itself, what’s the point?’ And John was a very kind man, so I’d say, ‘John, it’s a gig.’ So then we went on.”
And so I’ll go—we’ll go on—emboldened by Hentoff’s grandest ideas and deepest commitments, but not past the point of questioning ourselves. Maybe we’ll channel just enough of his itinerant subversive. >>
At one point in At the Jazz Band Ball, Hentoff wrote of sometimes “feeling fraudulent” for lack of technical knowledge about, say, chord substitutions. That feeling grew more intense when his daughter, at the time a budding musician, asked, “How can you dare affect the income of a musician when you give him bad reviews since you can’t say technically what you think he’s doing wrong?” In his book, Hentoff cut to an encounter with the arranger and bandleader Gil Evans. “I’ve been reading you for years,” Evans told him, “so I know what you listen to and how you listen. I also know musicians who can tell technically everything that’s going on in a performance, but they don’t get into where this music is coming from inside the musician—the story he wants to tell. You can do that some of the time. Stop worrying."
From The Daily Beast http://thebea.st/2j4LbwJ
<< Nat Hentoff Celebrated Jazz and Freedom
The late critic tirelessly supported the improvisational genius of America’s native art form and the rights of all citizens, contrarian or not, to speak their minds.
By Larry Blumenfeld
January 20, 2016
The death of Nat Hentoff at 91 on Jan. 7 was, to me, one final act of defiance.
According to his son Nicholas, Hentoff left us in the company of that which he loved dearly—surrounded by family, listening to Billie Holiday recordings.
And I suppose that Hentoff, who wrote with as much passion and insight about the Constitution as he did about Holiday’s music, simply refused to stick around to see Donald Trump take the presidential oath of office.
I imagined Hentoff whispering something like: “I fought against the Vietnam War. I spoke out during the Reagan administration, against George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion, and in defense of true liberalism and the Bill of Rights. This fight is yours.”
As an author, journalist, jazz critic, and civil libertarian, Hentoff’s intensity was matched by his productivity and range. He inspired me early on through his voluminous essays and books. And I was lucky. I go to know the man, who, by then, had a weathered face bordered by greying hair and beard, his piercing eyes softened only by his easy smile. Hentoff was a mentor and a guiding force for me, professionally and personally. I ended up following Hentoff’s lead, straddling unlikely mastheads through my work—The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, and Truthdig, for instance—and finding jazz a particularly good vehicle through which to address social justice. After the 2005 flood in New Orleans resulting from the levee failures after Hurricane Katrina, when I described to him the extent of injustice and inequity surrounding that situation, Hentoff told me, “You have to do something, and you can’t do nothing.” Thus followed a decade of my own reporting, supporting in part by funding Hentoff helped me find. Hentoff even helped me reconcile myself with the religion from which I’d strayed, Judaism.
The most resonant voice in the pages of his book At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene is that of the chazan—the cantor in the Orthodox Jewish synagogue Hentoff attended while growing up in Boston. It’s not that Hentoff was particularly observant (he called himself “a Jewish atheist” in the book). But in shul, he found a captivating voice that provoked both visceral and intellectual responses that turned his head around, and that lasted a lifetime.
“The passionate, mesmerizing, often improvisatory singing of the chazan,” he wrote, “sounded at times as if he were arguing with God.” At 11, when Hentoff heard “music blaring from a record store that made me shout aloud in pleasure” it was clarinetist Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare.”
Regardless of whether or not that particular keening A-minor melody of Shaw’s was based on a cantorial theme (Hentoff wrote that it was), a deeper connection with the music he would come to love and document—jazz—was thus forged. The cantor’s “soul cry of human promise, transcendence and vulnerability” was the same element Hentoff would home in on within the music of, say, Charles Mingus, the “depth of his witnessing to the human condition” an unbroken link for Hentoff to the blues at jazz’s base.
Hentoff said he was an “itinerant subversive” from the start. Growing up in a then predominantly Jewish Roxbury neighborhood within an otherwise largely anti-Semitic Boston, he grew defiantly individual and developed a strong sense of social justice while still quite young. In his memoir, Boston Boy, he recalled his defining moment of rebellion at age 12—eating a large salami sandwich on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of fasting and atonement, while sitting on his family’s porch. He enjoyed not so much “that awful sandwich” as the experience of rebellion, combined with the knowledge of “how it felt to be an outcast.”
Nathan Irving Hentoff was born in Boston on June 10, 1925, the son of Simon and Lena Katzenberg Hentoff. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and the tough Roxbury section that was his home was a vortex of political debate among Socialists, anarchists, Communists, Trotskyites, and other revolutionaries. He learned early how to rebel. He channeled his sensibilities into what he used to call his “day job—reporting on keeping the Bill of Rights alive,” reflected most prominently through his 50-year tenure as a columnist for The Village Voice and via many of his books. He also developed an early love and appreciation for jazz—a music he would come to write about as a “life force.”
Within jazz’s community, Hentoff found fellow itinerant subversives, including Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Jo Jones, and Paul Desmond. “These were my teachers,” Hentoff once told me, “people who took risks every single night.” While a student at Boston Latin High School, Hentoff spent most of his free time at jazz clubs like the Savoy Café. He befriended Ellington and others, including, later on, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.
Hentoff lived through a good chunk of jazz’s history, including its heyday within American popular culture. He got into radio in Boston while still a teenager, and did broadcasts from jazz clubs such as the Savoy and George Wein’s Storyville, where he got to know many musicians, and sometimes interviewed them on-air. From the start, he was interested in the music’s context as well as its content. He moved to New York to work as an editor for Down Beat magazine, which back then appealed to a much broader readership than it does today. In 1957, together with critic Whitney Balliett, he cast “The Sound of Jazz,” a landmark CBS program that brought the likes of Billie Holiday and Lester Young and more generally the sounds and attitudes of jazz into American living rooms; Hentoff called making that show “the most important thing I’ve ever done.” He wrote liner notes to groundbreaking recordings, including John Coltrane’s Expressions and Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. As A&R director of Candid Record, he was responsible for a long list of important and unexpected albums, including We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, which still stands as one of the most overtly political of jazz classics.
Among Hentoff’s many books is 1955’s Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It, which he edited with Nat Shapiro. It was a seminal work of oral history relating to jazz. “The reason Nat Shapiro and I did that,” Hentoff told me, “was that, at the time, there was a widely held belief—really a myth—that jazz musicians are inarticulate by and large, except on their horns. There was a sense among a number of the listeners that all you have to do is pick up your horn, and you blow. And we had the idea that you could have a book where the musicians told their stories, in part to show that they could tell their stories.”
Hentoff was neither the first nor the last jazz lover to exalt the music as both metaphor and laboratory for whatever we mean when we speak of an American experiment. Ralph Ellison expressed all that with more literary distinction and greater connection to the context of African-American arts. But if Ken Burns’s 19-hour PBS series “Jazz” in 2000 offered something of a caricature of jazz as the symbol of American values and virtues, Hentoff’s body of writings has come closest to painting an honest working portrait of the idea.
I recall interviewing Hentoff years ago, when Antonin Scalia was still on the Supreme Court, about the type of jazz pedagogy Ken Burns promoted. “Well, for one thing, John Marshall—who was the first, and in some ways, the most powerful Supreme Court justice in the beginning of the 19th century—said that the Constitution is a living document,” Hentoff said. “And unlike Scalia, who keeps an 18th century dictionary to find out what the framers had in mind, jazz is the same. Sidney Bechet, in that very good memoir of his, said, ‘You can’t hold the music back.’ And that means that you can’t categorize or fix anything in the music in terms of saying, ‘Only this is jazz, and this isn’t jazz.’ And the same thing goes for the evolving Bill of Rights. You can’t talk about the fourth amendment right to privacy only in terms of what the framers said. They didn’t know about wiretaps, let along telephones.”
Among the many diverse honors bestowed upon Hentoff—from, among other organizations, the Guggenheim Foundation, The American Bar Association, the National Press Association, and the American Library Association—was his designation in 2004 as one of six Jazz Masters by the National Endowment for the Arts, the first non-musician to win the honor.
And yet one of Hentoff’s endearing qualities—one missing in most music critics and political commentators today—was real humility. At one point in At the Jazz Band Ball, Hentoff wrote of sometimes “feeling fraudulent” for lack of technical knowledge about, say, chord substitutions. That feeling grew more intense when his daughter, at the time a budding musician, asked, “How can you dare affect the income of a musician when you give him bad reviews since you can’t say technically what you think he’s doing wrong?” In his book, Hentoff cut to an encounter with the arranger and bandleader Gil Evans. “I’ve been reading you for years,” Evans told him, “so I know what you listen to and how you listen. I also know musicians who can tell technically everything that’s going on in a performance, but they don’t get into where this music is coming from inside the musician—the story he wants to tell. You can do that some of the time. Stop worrying.”
Hentoff either stopped worrying, or went ahead anyway. Without discounting the value of or need for such critical analysis based on musical knowledge—how could he?—he argued for the narrative of jazz as a succession of stories of men and women who have shaped and lived the music.
“I’ve always had the sense when I was writing,” Hentoff once told me, “especially when I was doing liner notes, of asking myself, ‘What can I say that will be of use to someone in another generation?’ When I do liner notes, I interview the musicians. When I did notes for Coltrane, we’d always go through the same ritual. I’d call up and I’d say that the record company just gave me this. And he’d say, ‘I wish you wouldn’t write the notes because if the music doesn’t speak for itself, what’s the point?’ And John was a very kind man, so I’d say, ‘John, it’s a gig.’ So then we went on.”
And so I’ll go—we’ll go on—emboldened by Hentoff’s grandest ideas and deepest commitments, but not past the point of questioning ourselves. Maybe we’ll channel just enough of his itinerant subversive. >>
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