Columnist, scholar bestowed with honor of Jazz Master
NAT HENTOFF | 1925- 2017
NEW YORK — 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 DukeEllington 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.
Mr. 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, butMr. 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.”
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, Mr. 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.
Mr. Hentoff was born in 1925, the son of a RussianJewish 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.
In college, Northeastern University, Mr. 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.