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Which Writer Or Broadcaster Has Most Influenced Your Appreciation of Jazz?
by Ian Patterson
2024 was a sad year for All About Jazz, with the sudden passing of both John Kelman and Chris May severely rocking the ship. Each of these unique writers had dedicated twenty years to All About Jazz, promoting the music with love and artful care. Between them, these two venerable jazz advocates contributed over 4,000 articles to AAJ's archive. Arguably no other writer anywhere did more to turn the spotlight on the fantastically diverse and fertile Norwegian jazz ...
Continue ReadingTender and Fierce Blessings: Malcolm, Coltrane and My Mentor Nat Hentoff
by Christine Passarella
Dear Nat, It has been awhile since I wrote. You are heavily on my mind. I must say I miss the ability to reach out to you when I had something magnificent to say about my Kids for Coltrane Project in Education. Sharing other positive news in education such as George Lucas's online magazine Edutopia and the amazing research coming out of Harvard's Project Zero was nourishing. Working out my personal deep frustration with certain aspects of the ...
Continue ReadingHentoff helped pave way for jazz journalism’s acceptance
by Jim Trageser
Nat Hentoff's passing last week left me feeling, well, old. Whenever we lose a mentor--a grandparent, a teacher, someone who encouraged us--it's a reminder of our own mortality, that we are, in the parlance of football coaches, the next ones up. I don't feel anywhere near to ready or worthy or capable of assuming even a sliver of Hentoff's prodigious mantle, and yet the only way to honor a mentor is take up their work and carry it ...
Continue ReadingNat Hentoff: The Never-Ending Ball
by Ian Patterson
This interview was first published at All About Jazz on June 23, 2010. Nat Hentoff was eleven years old when, walking down the road one day in Boston, he heard music so exciting that he shouted with pleasure and ran into the shop to learn that the music was of clarinetist Artie Shaw. In that moment was born a love affair with jazz which has lasted seventy-four years thus far. At nineteen, Hentoff was hosting his own jazz ...
Continue ReadingA giant of jazz journalism silenced
by Jim Trageser
Nat Hentoff was an old-school intellectual whose favorite topic—whose very touchstone—was, throughout his life, jazz. At one point in the 1990s, Hentoff—who passed of natural causes on Jan. 7—announced that he was giving up writing about jazz to focus on topics that seemed more critical—free speech and civil liberties, which he felt were under constant attack from all ends of the political spectrum. And while he continued to advocate for free speech and civil liberties for the rest ...
Continue ReadingAt The Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years On The Jazz Scene
by Ian Patterson
At The Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years On The Jazz Scene Nat Hentoff Hardcover; 246 pages ISBN: 978-0-520-26113-6 University California Press 2010 The photograph which adorns the jacket of Nat Hentoff's At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years On The Jazz Scene--a collection of articles, interviews and reviews--couldn't be more appropriate. It depicts Louis Armstrong blowing his trumpet to the sky in an apparent state of rhapsody, ...
Continue ReadingBoston Boy: Growing Up with Jazz
by Kyle Simpler
Boston Boy Nat Hentoff Paul Dry Books ISBN: 096796752X
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