In the early nineties one of my tasks was to editorialize about important Supreme Court decisions when they were announced. An invaluable aid was a two-day annual Supreme Court Preview hosted each September by the William and Mary Law School’s Institute of Bill of Rights Law.
Those presenting the briefings for podunk journalists like me were big league men and women who covered the court full-time, like Linda Greenhouse of the Times, Lyle Denniston of the Baltimore Sun and Joan Biskupic of the Post. Also present were professors of constitutional law and advocates who had appeared before the Supremes, like Duke professor and Assistant Solicitor General Walter Dellinger.
This was pretty heady company, but I was most thrilled to be in the presence of Nat Hentoff who died last week at ninety-one. He wasn’t a lawyer, but he was a marvelous journalist and a passionate advocate for two things — jazz and civil liberties. The two went together, of course.
Born in 1925, Hentoff grew up in Roxbury, Boston with the sound of jazz all around him. By 14, as he told it, he could play anything written on his clarinet, but the trick of improvisation eluded him. One fateful day a 12-year-old neighbor heard him practicing and invited him to a jam session.
After a few minutes, Hentoff said he realized two things. He did not have what it took to be a pro and the kid did. It was Ruby Braff, who remained a friend and had a long career as a lyrical cornetist.
Instead of playing jazz, Hentoff would write about it for Down Beat until the magazine refused to hire several black writers Hentoff recommended. He took his talents elsewhere, notably to The Village Voice for the next fifty years. He wrote about jazz in reviews, interviews and liner notes. He even produced a few records.
But Hentoff was equally passionate about individual liberties under threat as they often were from McCarthy, segregationists, Nixon and many others up to today. Like Justice Hugo Black, who liked to whip out a pocket Constitution and pointedly stress “Congress shall make no law” abridging freedom of religion, speech, press or assembly, Hentoff was a First Amendment absolutist.
At the Supreme Court Preview he was like a wolf among cool, cerebral, judicious, academic, lawyerly sheep. He was shred, tart-tongued, demanding, uncompromising and perfectly willing to dispute the ideas of any President, Congressperson, Supreme Court Justice, professor, lawyer or fellow journalist if he thought they were advocating the dilution of Constitutional protections.
He was, in short, an old-fashioned, grassroots, citizen patriot and scribe who thought speaking truth to power was not just a duty or a vocation but a contact sport. In a world of button-down organization men, he was a rumpled original whose heroes included Charles Mingus and I.F. Stone.
Hentoff called himself a troublemaker and was proud of it. He started early, pointedly munching on a salami sandwich on his front porch one Sabbath about the time of his bar mitzvah as horrified neighbors passed on the way to synagogue. As a jazz writer, however, he was happier celebrating than criticizing and could extol everyone from Fats Waller to Bob Dylan to Merle Haggard. His music collections include “The Jazz Life” and “Listen to the Stories.” His civil liberties volumes include “The First Freedom” and “Free Speech for Me — But Not for Thee.”
Educated at Boston Latin and Northwestern University, he managed to get the student newspaper shut down with a muckraking expose of anti-semitic trustees. Raised among depression-era lefties, he also contributed to The Wall Street Journal and was willing to make common cause with the right wing, libertarian Cato Institute when it came to government encroachment on civil liberties.
When asked what motivated him, Hentoff once said “rage,” but probably with a twinkle in his eye. He wrote on serious subjects, but was never dour or doctrinaire. Indeed, he was a lively companion on the page and could be mordantly funny, as when he said he had been lifelong friends with the great saxophonist Paul Desmond, even though Desmond had introduced him to his first wife.
He was a lovely, prickly, no-fools-gladly, enthusiastic kind of guy, great American who shared his love of our native music and his belief in the need for opposition to the forces of repression. He sought to make his country a better place, and did.
I feel lucky to have spent a few days in his presence. His son reported he died surrounded by his progeny, listening to Billie Holiday. Since she was a woman who sang joyously about “Getting Some Fun Out of Life” and chillingly about the outrage of lynchings in “Strange Fruit,” who better to perform a requiem for Nat.