Nathan Irving Hentoff is 89, still writing occasionally about jazz and still producing controversy over his civil liberties positions. Nat is an institution in jazz. For over fifty years he wrote a column for the Village Voice, churned out liner notes, produced records, and always, always has conveyed his love of the music and its players.
Now he is the subject of a documentary, called The Pleasures of Being Out of Step, presently showing in New York and Beverly Hills and hopefully in other venues. You can see a short trailer here. The film is a series of his life’s highlights with commentaries by Hentoff and others who know him, like his wife Margot, Stanley Crouch and Amiri Baraka. I’m not able to see this in Mexico, but if any of you do see it, please let me know your impressions.
To honor full disclosure, I should say that Nat was instrumental in helping me find a publisher for my book Mingus Speaks and gave it a favorable, if rambling, review.
It’s hard for me to read and accept much of the stuff he writes about Constitutional law in a host of publications. Nat is a complicated cat who, as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, defends the life of the fetus even as he proclaims individual freedoms. He supports Senator Rand Paul.
The other thing about Nat that irritates me from time to time is his writing style which can be grainy, pseudo-scholarly, ponderoso. Some of his liner notes are like that, and they tend to emphasize his personal involvement with the musicians rather than the listeners.
Still and all, throughout his long life Nat has been not just a critic but a fine chronicler of jazz music and its pleasures. No one has been more important in spreading the gospel.
