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Nat Hentoff
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"Nat Hentoff is a superb writer and first class public intellectual. He is a man of consistent, steadfast principle, a moral purist in an age of hand-wringing accommodationists. This unyielding consistency has made him an iconoclast's iconoclast. Indeed, Hentoff has described himself as "a Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer." Talk about cutting against almost every societal grain: No wonder he both thrills--and upsets--so many people!
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Nat Hentoff is the author of many articles and books about jazz, politics, and education, including Free Speech for Me–But Not for Thee (1992). His syndicated column, "Sweet Land of Liberty," appears in the Washington Post and more than two hundred other newspapers, and he is a weekly contributor to the Village Voice. He lives in New York City.
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Nat Hentoff wrote the below article in Jazz Times, September 2003, a few months after chiding NPR for its lack of support for Dixieland. Sadly the Cajun no longer operates, but the Gotham City Jazzmen do, at the Donnell Branch of the NYC Public Library every Thursday at 12:30 to 2:00 PM. Cheers, Steve Barbone by Nat Hentoff - September 2003 issue of JazzTimes ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jazz for Lunch at the Cajun - by Nat Hentoff - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Long ago, Whitney Balliett described jazz as "the sound of surprise." That continual proof of the music's life force seized me once again listening to Stefon Harris' The Grand Unification Theory (Blue Note)‹a wondrous mosaic of freshly multicolored writing with intriguingly subtle dynamics, along with singular soloists. His music needs no labels like "postmodern" or "cutting edge." It is Stefon Harris music, as Charles Mingus', he insisted, was Mingus music. At lunch recently at the Cajun, a restaurant on Eight Avenue and 16th Street in New York, where you can get Louisiana catfish, I was surprised at how much pleasure there still is in some of the jazz I grew up with. Many years ago, at Lester Young's then home in Queens, after a long interview, I was almost out the door when he, the embodiment of what was "hip" in jazz at the time (off as well as on the bandstand), said to me: "Do you like Dixieland?" "Sure," I answered, "if its good." "Me too," said Pres.
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In addition to his weekly Village Voice column, Nat Hentoff writes on music for the Wall Street Journal. Among other publications in which his work has appeared are the New York Times, the New Republic, Commonweal, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, where he was a staff writer for more than 25 years. Hentoff’s views on journalistic responsibility and the rights of Americans to write, think and speak freely are expressed in his weekly column, and he has come to be acknowledged as a foremost authority in the area of First Amendment defense. He is ... an expert on the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court, student rights and education.
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N[A]t Hentoff was born in Boston in 1925. He received his B.A. with the highest honors from Northeastern University and did graduate work at Harvard. He was a Fulbright fellow at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950. From 1953 through 1957 he was associate editor of Down Beat magazine. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in education and an American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award in 1980 for his coverage of the law and criminal justice in his columns. In 1985 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Laws by Northeastern University.
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"Nat Hentoff's last book on music was published nineteen years ago, and in the interim readers may have forgotten how well he writes on the subject. . . . The book's title immediately signals Mr. Hentoff's primary strength: a great ear for a story."
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Nat Hentoff