Final Chorus
April 2009 By Nat Hentoff
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 By Nat Hentoff
Going Inside Jazz With Wynton
Nat Hentoff gives a thumbs up to Wynton Marsalis' new book
November 2008 By Nat Hentoff
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 By Nat Hentoff
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 By Nat Hentoff
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 By Nat Hentoff
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 By Nat Hentoff
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 By Nat Hentoff
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...
