Nat Hentoff
Nat’s Contributions
April 2010 Final Chorus
Annie Ross & the Jazz Masters
The most startling phone call I ever received was in 2004 from someone I had never met. He began by saying, “This is probably the best message you’ve ever gotten from your government.” It was Dana Gioia, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts...
March 2010 Final Chorus
Vince Guaraldi: That Joyous Thing
Despite writing about jazz musicians for over 60 years, I am sometimes sharply reminded that I’ve essentially missed, or badly underestimated, a vital individualist. It happened again on Nov. 28 as I was listening to National Public Radio’s wide-ranging...
January/February 2010 Final Chorus
Torture Chamber Music
Nat Hentoff looks at how music has been used for torture and what musicians are doing about it.
November 2009 Columns
From 4 Years Old to 84, A Jazz-Band Ball
Randy Sandke's Jazz for Juniors CD makes Nat Hentoff feel like a kid again.
August/September 2009 Final Chorus
Final Chorus: Listening Guides for M.D.s and Us
When I was a kid, doctors made house calls and learned more about a patient’s living and emotional conditions than they did taking a medical history in an office. These days, many increasingly overburdened doctors can usually give a patient little more than...
April 2009 Final Chorus
How Jazz Helps Doctors Listen
There is a growing momentum in medical education to make doctors aware that they not only take the patient’s history, but, much more meaningfully, must listen to his or her stories about why they came to a doctor. Too often a physician makes a diagnosis...
January/February 2009 Final Chorus
Going Inside Jazz With Wynton
Nat Hentoff gives a thumbs up to Wynton Marsalis' new book
November 2008 Final Chorus
A Jazz Bridge to Musicians in Need
Just as certain musicians—Armstrong, Parker, Coltrane—have influenced so many others, so the Jazz Foundation of America has helped spur a vital regional organization, the Philadelphia-based Jazz Bridge Project (215-517-8337; jazzbridge.org), to be of multi...
October 2008 Final Chorus
Jazz’s First Lady of Charity
When Phoebe Jacobs, longtime friend and associate of Louis Armstrong, says, “Don’t let anyone tell you Louis is dead because he’s not,” she’s not talking only about the continuing presence of his music all around the world. As the central force of the Louis...
September 2008 Final Chorus
Old Country Jewish Blues & Ornette
There’s a country music song, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” of which I never tire, and it jumped to mind as I was reading an advance copy of Ben Ratliff’s characteristically illuminating new book, The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music (Times Books). The...
August 2008 Final Chorus
Jazz Revelations for Baby Boomers
A lawyer I know began his jazz listening with the bebop of Bird and Dizzy, although he knew they had forebears whom he intended to sample eventually. Upon hearing Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” on Newark jazz station WBGO, he excitedly called me: “Where...
June 2008 Final Chorus
Is Jazz Black Music?
In January, I was on a panel at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The subject, “Is Jazz Black Music?” is still a lively and even combative one in some quarters. When I was invited, what first came to mind was Duke Ellington telling me long ago that in the 1920s, he...
May 2008 Final Chorus
New Finds for the Jazz Bookshelf
More than the rest of us who write about jazz, Whitney Balliett’s words describing music often turned into music. Yet the last book he wrote before his death last year was turned down by such mainstream publishers as Oxford University Press (which had published...
April 2008 Final Chorus
Swinging Spoken Words
When I came upon video interviews with 280 jazz musicians (available on CD, DVD, audiocassette and in print), it was for me like hearing the voices of participants in the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where our swinging liberties were being...
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ReportAbout Nat Hentoff
Nat Hentoff requires no introduction. In addition to protecting your civil liberties through his writings in The Village Voice and The Washington Times, Hentoff is also one of jazz’s premier critics. Hentoff’s “Final Chorus” column has closed each issue of JazzTimes since Feb. 1999. “What JazzTimes does every issue is to keep the life force of this music—in all its unpredictable dimensions—alive! Glad to be with the gig,” says Hentoff.