Jazz has lost a major voice and ardent champion. No, we’re not talking about another jazz musician from one or another bygone “golden age” who has passed on, but one of the greatest jazz writers we’ve had, Nat Hentoff, who has relocated to the realm of legend and legacy. He leaves behind a mountain of words, ideas, attitudes, and passions filtered through his finely tuned ears and set to paper. Jazz is much the richer for his input.
Hentoff — whose love of and scribing about jazz goes back to doing radio in the late 1940s, writing for and editing Down Beat in the ’50s, and moving on to many other venues, wending through many of its twists, upheavals, and evolutionary turns over 70-plus years — died on January 7, at age 91, and still writing. Reportedly, he died with family around him and Billie Holiday on the box — a dreamy and apt ending to a life well and musically lived.
Among other forms, Hentoff’s integral voice has appeared on many a liner note for albums, in jazz and elsewhere (including Bob Dylan’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), going back to the time when record liner notes were an important source of info and zeitgeist-building (imagine that). In his liner notes for Charles Mingus’s classic 1963 album Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Hentoff quotes an interview in which the iconoclastic artist pondered, “What’s so funny is some people think a composer’s supposed to please him, but in a way a composer is a chronicler like a critic. He’s supposed to report on what he’s seen and lived.” At the risk of inflating the role of the critic, a good, thoughtful one helps to bring clarity and thought provocation to the enlivened space between composer/performer and listener, a process that comes close to the act of art-making.
