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| Nat Hentoff, in 2007 |
The nation
lost a unique voice, and the Fillius Jazz Archive lost a supporter with the
passing of Nat Hentoff on January 7. Mr. Hentoff died at the age of 91 at his
home in Manhattan. In a career that spanned seven decades, he excelled as a
jazz critic and as an astute observer of our nation and its politics. The
Associated Press opined, “Nat Hentoff enjoyed a diverse and iconoclastic
career, basking in the freedom to be infuriating on a myriad of subjects.”
Nat was
interviewed for the Fillius Jazz Archive in New York City on January 12, 2007,
almost ten years ago to the day of this blog.
As a child
Nat loved jazz and had aspirations to pursue a career as a musician.
NH: I was taking clarinet lessons from an
alumnus of the Boston Symphony and I was about 13, 14 years old. And I could
read anything. And I was playing scales one day near an open window, it was a
summer day. And all of a sudden I hear a shout from downstairs. “Hey kid, you
want to go to a session?” I look down, there’s this short kid and I figured
well I can read anything, so I went. And when we got there this kid took out
his horn and began to play and I knew then that I’d have to find a day job that
wasn’t in jazz. It was [jazz cornetist] Ruby
Braff. He was about my age. He was already playing extraordinarily beautiful
stuff.
Due to his
passion for the music, Nat still found himself in the middle of the jazz scene.
As a co-producer for the 1957 “Sounds of Jazz” Live TV special, he witnessed a
poignant moment between Lester Young and Billie Holiday. Here is a link to that moment, seen in this clip at 1:25.
NH: The background of that was Lester was not
feeling well. He was supposed to be in one of the big band sections with the
all-time sax section: Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, I forget who else we had
there. I said look, you don’t have to do that, and when you do the small combo
thing with Billie, you can just sit down. And then she came on in a circle with
Roy Eldridge and Lester etcetera. He got up and in the control room, people, as
this was unfolding, had tears in their eyes. It was such a moment. Because they
were looking at each other, as Lester played. And they had been very close and
then not so close, and it was so personal and so intimate, and I was so glad we
got that for the ages.
Like the
musicians he so admired, Nat was required to wear multiple career hats which
seemed to suit him well. I asked him about making a living as a writer/critic.
MR: Was it tough raising a family of four kids
as a freelance journalist?
NH: It was tough for a while because I got
fired. My one gig was at Down Beat when the first child was coming along and I
committed a wrongdoing. We were writing essentially about black music. We had
no black employees, no black writers in either New York, Chicago where the
headquarters were, or in Los Angeles. The boss wasn’t interested in the music
at all; he ran a printing shop but he owned the paper. He did not like Jews, he
did not like blacks. And one day a woman came in. I thought she was black and
we needed a sort of a receptionist so I figured okay we can start with that. I
didn’t check with him. He found out about it and I was fired. Years later when
I wrote about it she wrote me a note and she said well you know I’m not black,
I’m Egyptian. Well some of the theorists today would say yes you are. But
anyway that left me in a hole, and Norman Granz was very helpful. He gave me a
whole bunch of liner notes for a hundred bucks apiece, and that paid the rent
for a while. But I had to freelance. And the Village Voice was very important.
They didn’t pay us at the time. But I went there on one condition, that I
didn’t have to write about jazz. Because in terms of the newspaper and magazine
editors, I was stereotyped, talk about categorizing. So I could write about
anything I wanted to: education, the laws, civil liberties. And that got me
started as a freelance writer.
Nat was
highly attuned to the sharing of accurate information. Even though our
interview took place ten years ago, the proliferation of instant Internet
access was a concern to him.
NH: This is an extraordinary paradox. There’s
never been a time in human history when there’s been so much instant access to
information — or what appears to be information. The 24 hour news cycle is such
that the idea of reporting in teams or a reporter getting months to do a story,
that’s very rare now. So what you get are, if not sound bites, quick stories.
And once something else happens — when I was growing up in Boston the reporters
had a phrase, follow-up. You all had to follow-up on the story. But there’s not
much of that either. And this cacophony of information, it’s increasingly on
the Internet. Most of the newspapers, to stay alive, are going increasingly on
the Internet, and they’re being contested by bloggers and they’re multiplying.
But there’s no filter as to what you’re hearing from the bloggers. Is it information
or just unvarnished biased opinion? So in a time when we have access to all
this information I think there’s more confusion than ever before.
Nat Hentoff
wrote supportively of the oral history project that is the Fillius Jazz
Archive, and his opinions about our effort appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and Jazz
Times. We shared a love for the music and personality of singer Joe
Williams, and Nat wrote glowingly about our 2005 release of the CD “Havin’ a
Good Time” culled from reel to reel tapes from Joe Williams’ estate. At the end
of our interview, Nat evoked Joe’s name:
MR: I’m very appreciative of you giving me your
time today.
NH: Oh look, as you can tell I enjoy talking.
But one of your friends, I was once in Joe Williams’ dressing room and we were
talking about players who are no longer here, some because of their own damn
fault. And Joe looked at me and said, “You and I are survivors.” And I felt
like I’d been knighted, that Joe would put me in his company.
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