Nat Hentoff an Afternoon With Miles Davis the Jazz Review

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Postscript

Nat Hentoff: The Free-Thinking Quick-Change Artist of the Hamlet Voice

1925-2017

Although nigh knew him as a Village Voice columnist, Nat Hentoff was a quick-change artist. In the morn, he could exist a music critic. In the afternoon, a novelist of young developed lit. In the evening, he could excel equally a historian, an anti-abortion activist, a record producer, a feature writer or a broadcaster, depending on the assignment he had drawn. Had he not died in January and lived across his 91 years, who knows what other duds he would accept donned? Comic book creative person? Sculptor? Dancer?

Above all, this kid of Russian immigrants born in Boston in 1925 was a freethinker, questioning orthodoxies where he encountered them. Every bit a critic, he countenanced no boundaries in music, writing nigh Duke Ellington, Bob Wills, Bob Dylan and Charles Ives equally if their tracks belonged on a playlist together. As a reporter, he countenanced no boundaries in topics, writing profiles for the New Yorker about Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, New York Mayor John Lindsay, author/illustrator Maurice Sendak, Bob Dylan (again), jazzman Gerry Mulligan and others. In his Playboy interviews with Eldridge Cleaver, William Sloane Coffin, William Kunstler, Bob Dylan (yet over again) and others, he went at his subjects similar twoscore-grit sandpaper, scrubbing through surfaces to get to the meat. His Vocalism column, which ran from 1958 to 2009, showcased his skills as an advocate, generally every bit a defender of our civil liberties.

Hentoff'southward rebellions against the condition quo began early. Ane of his first targets was the Jewish faith into which he was born. In his memoir, Boston Boy, he writes of eating a salami sandwich on his front end porch on Yom Kippur, a day when Jews are supposed to fast, every bit other Jews walked past to nourish services at the synagogue. "I wanted to know how it felt to be an outcast," he wrote. "Except for my father's reaction and for getting ill, it turned out to be quite enjoyable." His symbolic rebellions connected: He insisted on living an analog lifestyle, preferring a typewriter, fax machine and a landline to the modernistic conveyances.

Hentoff looked similar an One-time Attestation prophet—"I belong to the four,000-yr-old tradition of atheistic Judaism," he told me, every bit I edited one of his pieces—and could argue the law better than most lawyers, lecturing judges on precedents and procedures. Merely he wasn't an belligerent man. Instead, he practiced persuasion in his 70-plus years of piece of work. As the journalist Tobin Harshaw once observed, Hentoff could provoke intense disagreement among his readers without necessarily provoking anger. While he didn't bring peace to the American valley, his work did inspire respect across the political spectrum. What other writer could possibly earn a Viking'southward send-off from both National Review and the Nation?

In his afterward years, Hentoff'southward opposition to ballgame fabricated him persona non grata in many corners, including at the Vox, where some writers shunned him. He opposed abortion, he said, for the same reason he opposed death sentence: To make any sense, he wrote, the fight for life must be "indivisible." The position fabricated him a million enemies on the left, as did his criticisms of other forms of political piety. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Hentoff wrote, were as insincere protectors of the Bill of Rights as George Westward. Bush-league. But the enmity Hentoff faced fabricated him happy, considering he didn't take himself that seriously. "I found out that having a byline can quickly brand you an authority to people who aren't very intelligent about authority," he said in a documentary about his life.

Hentoff loved practically all music only especially jazz, making his first professional person mark every bit a disc jockey and then as a critic. "No writer did more for jazz," best-selling the critic Terry Teachout. Hentoff's shut relationships with such jazz figures equally Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans and Charles Mingus, all of whom he wrote liner notes for, made him "one of the last living links to the founding fathers," as Teachout put it. (I of Hentoff'south near famous sets of liner notes was for—you lot guessed it—Bob Dylan.) Hentoff returned to the discipline of jazz once again and again in his books and articles, as if recharging himself for his more profane works. Reading his pieces, you find yourself humming to a deep rhythm of his invention.

Hentoff worked for well-nigh every publication that mattered—a partial list of credits would include DownBeat, Esquire, Harper's, Commonweal, the Reporter, the New Yorker, Playboy, the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New York Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Periodical, the Nation, Rolling Stone, Enquiry and the New York Times—but he never stopped writing, never retired, even after the Vocalization sacked him in 2009.

In that cheerio Voice cavalcade, Hentoff's final line thanked his readers for all the kind comments streaming in.

"It's like hearing my obituaries while I'm nonetheless here," he wrote.

Nat Hentoff died at his Manhattan home with his family by his side, listening to Billie Vacation.

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Mind to Hentoff interview Dylan for ii hours. Transport your contrarian views to [email protected]. My e-mail alerts toil in the morning time, Twitter feed labors in the afternoon, and my RSS feed for takes every evening off.

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Source: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/28/nat-hentoff-obituary-216188/

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