Hentoff - At the jazz band ball sixty years on the jazz scene

If youve ever had the chance to speak with Nat Hentoff, you wont be surprised to learn that he has a background in radiohe speaks clearly and decisively, with never an um or uhh. As he recounted in a 2007 interview with jazz musician and historian Loren Schoenberg:

By luck I got into radio. I had worked in a candy store with a guy named Ed Blackman, who later became an announcer before he became a professor of religion, and there was an opening at this radio station. I was a staff announcer. I also covered politics. But I got them to let me do a jazz program on time they couldnt sell [i.e., when they had no sponsors]. That led to my inviting up [Duke] Ellington, Rex Stewart and all those people. [I] got to know them somewhat It was called The Jazz Album. A lot of the tapes are now at the University of New Hampshire. A woman, Dorothy Cook, who came to live there, she and her husband had taped the shows.

Those taped shows must be a gold mine, and reading this collection gives one some of the flavor of what Nat has to offer as a jazz commentator. But before we say more about that, a little background on Nats life might be in order. Nat was born on June 10, 1925, in Boston, and, as he recounts in his memoir Boston Boy, his parents were Russian Jewish immigrants, Simon Hentoff and Lena Katzenberg. His younger sister went to Girls Latin School. Shes now Janet Krauss, a professor at Fairfield University and a published poet. Nat came to New York in 1953 to work as the citys editor of the jazz magazine Down Beat until 1957. He has been in Manhattan ever since.

His memoirs are continued, informally (as a collection of stories, rather than as a chronological account), in Boston Boy and Speaking Freely. As his devoted readers will know, Nat has led another career as a civil libertarian and political reporter. He received his B.A. with highest honors from Northeastern University and did graduate work at Harvard. In 1950, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Paris at the Sorbonne. He has won awards for his coverage of the law and criminal justice in his columns, notably during his fifty-year tenure at the Village Voice. In 1985, his alma mater, Northeastern University, awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Laws. We wont list all of his many awards here, but Nat is rightly proud that in 1995 the National Press Foundation gave him their award for lifetime distinguished contributions to journalism.

It was Nats personal politics that got him into writing about the world of politics. He was fired from Down Beat in 1957 for hiring a staff person of color, against the rules of the then owner of the magazine (somewhat shocking to us today, for a magazine about music of black Americans!). It took a few months, into 1958, before he landed another steady job. Again quoting from the interview with Loren Schoenberg, Nat recalls, So finally a guy from the [Village] Voice said, Wed like you to do a column. I said, Okay, only on one proviso, that I will not write about jazz. Nat insisted on this condition and accepted the offer, even though at first there was no pay, because it allowed him to broaden his purview and reputation as a writer on topics beyond jazz. So began his celebrated career as a political commentator, particularly focused on the First Amendment, the freedom of speech. He stayed at the Village Voice for fifty years, until December 2008, when his many readers were shocked to learn that he had been let go, along with other casualties of budget cuts.

But Nat landed on his feet, as they say. In a press release dated February 13, 2009, the Cato Institute welcomed Nat as Senior Fellow, describing him as one of the foremost authorities on the First Amendment. No American in recent history has done more in defense of free speech and the First Amendment than the great civil libertarian Nat Hentoff. All of us at Cato are honored to have him as a colleague. The Cato Institute is a nonprofit public policy research foundation headquartered in Washington, D.C. The institute is named for