JAZZ HISTORIAN
Nat Hentoff, a political and cultural columnist who was a passionate defender of 1st Amendment rights, has died. He was 91.
Nat Hentoff, the venerable political and cultural columnist who distinguished himself as a preeminent jazz critic for Down Beat magazine in the 1950s and, in later decades, as a passionate defender of 1st Amendment freedoms in columns for the Village Voice, the New Yorker, the Washington Post and the Washington Times, has died. He was 91.
His son, Tom Hentoff, told the Associated Press that his father died from natural causes at his Manhattan apartment.
For his 60-plus-year career as a journalist, Hentoff was preoccupied with authenticity and truth — no matter how uncomfortable or unvarnished. And though he would point to jazz and “being Jewish” as deep inf luences in his writing and thinking, it was his unbending protection of the 1st Amendment and civil liberties that he considered “of all of my obsessions ... the strongest.”
The author of more than three dozen books and the subject of the 2014 documentary “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step: Notes on the Life of Nat Hentoff,” Hentoff moved seamlessly between discourses on jazz and politics, adult and young-adult fiction, mysteries and memoir.
Considered a fiercely independent thinker, Hentoff consistently concerned himself with America’s conscience and how it was publicly expressed — both through its home-grown musical traditions (jazz in particular and, later, a swath of American vernacular music — folk, blues, bluegrass) and in his strict, tothe-letter and often controversial interpretation of the Constitution.
“I think we’re in a perilous state,” Hentoff told the New York Times in 2009, “in that, to paraphrase [President] Madison, the way to keep this republic is to have an informed electorate.” Instead, we have “constitutional illiteracy, which is rampant.”
Hentoff ’s long career was built around agitating, challenging what he often saw as faulty rhetoric and partyline thinking — a convenient tailoring (or silencing) of language to meet the needs of the crisis of the moment — including book banning and abortion.
An often self-described member of “The Proud and Ancient Order of Stiff-Necked Jewish Atheists,” Hentoff dodged nothing. He believed not in fewer words, but better ones: a clear, concise argument, supported with research and reporting.
In a San Francisco Chronicle review of his 1993 book, “Free Speech for Me — But Not for Thee,” Patricia Holt wrote: “He’s self-righteous, preachy and pompous — but as is true with his book ... Hentoff is also one of the most accessible enlightening authors in the country.”
Over the years, in his books, newspaper and magazine columns, or behind the lectern (he held adjunct positions at New York University and the New School for Social Research), Hentoff had often described himself as a “man of the left,” yet he persistently confounded those who identified similarly.
This was primarily because of his unwavering stance on hot-button issues such as abortion (he opposed it), capital punishment (he supported it) and freedom of speech (he opposed hate-crime laws because he said they “dangerously” punish thought).
“Nat had a way of pissing off the writers and editors of two generations of lefties ... by which, I mean just about everyone who came of age from the Vietnam era on,” Village Voice contributor Allen Barra wrote in 2008, when Hentoff was laid off after a 60-year association with the paper. “[It] was unmatched by anyone I know of.”
For many, it was difficult to square the hard-line columnist with his earlier incarnation: the bearded Greenwich Village denizen who spent many after-the-last-set hours talking with African American jazz legends — among them John Coltrane and Max Roach, who struggled with and articulated oppression within their music.
The son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Nathan Irving Hentoff was born in Boston on June 10, 1925. His parents, Simon and Lena, settled in Roxbury, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, to raise their son in their Old World traditions.
His time in Roxbury was a bitter, violent taste of American intolerance that would shape him. Those years became a crucible: “I was an outsider,” Hentoff once wrote, “and therefore I learned to be continually skeptical of what insiders with power said and believed.”
Being an outcast created a bridge-building empathy of understanding. From an early age, Hentoff made a connection between the forthright playing of jazz musicians and the outside-the-lines possibilities of an improvised life.
Hentoff frequently related the story that he first heard jazz tumbling out a window of a downtown record store while on his way to classes at the prestigious Boston Latin Academy. It was “a fierce wailing of brass and reeds, a surging, pulsing cry that made me cry out too.” He was hooked.
Hentoff ’s journalism career was christened by a free speech battle. At Northeastern University, he became editor of the student newspaper.
His staff had uncovered a corruption story that involved city government. The administration intervened, asking Hentoff to pull the story. Instead, the entire staff quit.
From then on, Hentoff became passionately interested in the freedom of the press — and the attendant 1st Amendment freedoms.
“Few have assiduously and consistently defended the right of people to express their views no matter how objectionable,” journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote in a Los Angeles Times review of Hentoff’s 1997 memoir, “Speaking Freely.”
Hentoff stood firm on this for his entire career.