Writer loved being free to infuriate
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 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 nonmusician 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 Ke e p e r ” a n d “B l u e s f o r Charles Darwin” and the memoirs “Boston Boy” and “Speaking Freely.”
An assembly of Irish citizens convened by Parliament is considering changes to a near-total ban on abortions, enshrined in Ireland’s Constitution since 1983.
The group, a 100-member Citizens’ Assembly led by Mary Laffoy, a Supreme Court judge, does not have the power to change the law. But its mandate from Parliament — to examine the full range of medical, legal and ethical issues surrounding abortion — suggests a willingness to revisit the ban, one of the most stringent in the Western world.