The chazzan has come! A heavy man in his late fifties, with thick glasses and a face made for a cigar, he looks, on the street, like the grocer’s assistant who will never have his own store. But now, in his black robes and high black skullcap, he looms over the congregation, and I stop snapping at God, for I am transfixed. The chazzan closes his eyes as the spirit comes. What he sings is partly written, largely improvised. He is a master of melisma—for each sacred syllable there are three, four, six notes that climb and entwine, throbbing in wait for the next spiraling cluster. The chazzan is a tenor, what they call in opera a dramatic tenor, but what drama in opera is comparable to this continual dialogue with God? This is not an aria; there are consequences for those who speak to Him with false notes. The voice is bold and clear, dark in color, but there is no heaviness. The chazzan soars effortlessly, pleading, demanding, refusing to allow God to forget for one moment that the Jews in this place have not forgotten Him, certainly not on this day, nor will they in all the days to come, so enough already! Or at least no more afflictions than last year. In the balcony, the women nod, and some moan, in agreement. The cry. The krechts (a catch in the voice, a sob, a cry summoning centuries of ghosts of Jews). The dynamics of the chazzan are stunning—a thunderstorm of fierce yearning that reverberates throughout the shul. And then, as if the universe had lost a beat, there is sudden silence—but no, there is a sound, a far distant sound, coming, my God, from deep inside the chazzan, an intimation of falsetto, a sadness so unbearably compressed that I wonder the chazzan does not explode. The room is swaying; the chazzan, eyes still closed, does explode—his soul, riding a triumphant vibrato, goes right through the roof. Years later, at a bar, between sets of the volcanic Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, I am telling a black nationalist and Mingus about Jewish blues, blues that are thousands of years old, blues with plenty of their own soul. Mingus is interested. He wants to hear some. But the other guy, he says blues are only one color, his. Mingus says words sure do get in the way of hearing. - Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy
One of the greatest thrills of my life so far has been knowing Nat Hentoff. Nat was a personal hero and one of the greatest music and social commentary writers of all time. He passed away in 2017 at the age of 91, surrounded by family and the music of Billie Holiday.
There are so many recordings that totally changed my life when I first heard them and, in many cases, it’s thanks to the way Nat wrote about them that I actually got to hear them in the first place (here's a list of the nearly 600 albums he wrote liner notes to). He had this wonderful, very enticing way of writing about music that just made me want to immediately run to the record store and listen to whatever it was that he was writing about. I loved reading his column in JazzTimes as a teenager and thought it was pretty cool that he included his home phone number at the bottom of each article.
Shortly after moving to New York in the fall of 2007, I got an internship at the Blue Note Jazz Club. One of my first tasks there was to transcribe a few interviews that Nat had recently conducted at the club. We’d often fax the completed transcriptions to Nat, but, occasionally, on my way home, I’d swing by his building on West 12th Street and leave the transcriptions with his doorman.
Eventually word got back to me that he liked my transcription style, so I decided to share a recent recording of mine (my very first) with him.
Nat and Joe
I was very nervous as I walked to his building to drop off my recording; at that point, I had only shared my music with maybe one or two other people in the whole jazz business and knew that sharing my music with Nat, the pinnacle of jazz criticism, was a risky move.
As soon as I walked out the door of his building after dropping off the recording, it occurred to me that so many musicians must do the same thing, so I decided that it couldn’t hurt to leave the doorman a few bucks to ensure that my recording was delivered. I thought it over as I paced, quite nervously, for a few minutes outside his building. I was so visibly nervous, in fact, that when I finally walked back into the building and reached my hand into my pocket, the doorman jumped, thinking, as he told me later, that I was reaching for a gun. He breathed a big sigh of relief, however, when all I pulled out was a few dollar bills. We laughed it off and the package was, thankfully, delivered.
I was shocked when, a few weeks later, I received a call from Nat. More shocking, however, was the content of his voicemail. He loved the album and said that he planned on eventually writing about it. And that was the start of a beautiful friendship.
At that time, Nat was still very busy writing for the Village Voice, JazzTimes and the The Wall Street Journal, among others. Whenever I called him or he called me, he always seemed in a hurry. He didn’t waste time with small talk and “how are you’s?”. Instead, he’d call and, immediately upon my answering, would launch into why exactly he was calling. When the conversation was finished, he simply hung up. Very rarely was there a “bye.”
I was a naive 20-something with little experience being around people I idolized, and Nat’s hurried, no-nonsense way of speaking made me quite nervous. But as we got to know each other better, I began to find his way of communicating both charming and refreshing. Nat’s way of conversation felt, somehow, like a connection to a bygone New York, a city of old-school intellectuals with outsized personalities.
Sometimes, he’d pick up the phone, say, “I can’t talk now,” follow it with either “I’m on deadline,” “I’m trying to save the constitution,” or “I’m protecting your civil liberties,” and then abruptly hang up.
Over the next six or seven years, we spoke quite frequently (a few times a week at one point), and it stayed that way until shortly before his passing when his hearing made phone conversations difficult.
He told me amazing stories about:
Duke Ellington, who, Nat said, sent him a Christmas card in March or April of the year he died because he wanted to make sure to get his Christmas greetings out before his passing (as it turned out, he died that May).
Charles Mingus, who used to call him to play or whistle new compositions and melodies over the phone.
Charlie Parker, who told him he loved country music for the stories.
Earl Scruggs, who once saved him from a beating by some anti-semites down South who didn’t like Hentoff’s Jewish-looking beard.
Malcom X, who used to phone his house as “Mr. X”.
Bob Dylan, with whom Hentoff wrote for and about many times, told me “the real story” behind his conducting this famed 1966 interview with Dylan for Playboy. (I was always impressed by Dylan’s brilliant, improvisatory made-up answers; to hear Hentoff tell it, they were actually worked out before-hand. Dylan had originally conducted a totally straight interview with Hentoff; however, at the time, Playboy had a policy where writers had to show subjects their interviews before they went to print. Upon reviewing the initial interview, Dylan didn’t like the straight-laced one, and made Hentoff conduct another on the spot, which is this famous one).
Fats Waller buying him his first steak dinner (with Nat gone, are first person Fats Waller stories now extinct?), and so many others.
He’d often tell me that he wished he could’ve introduced me to Willie “The Lion” Smith. He said that he thought the two of us would’ve gotten along nicely. I always got a kick out of that.
We didn’t really talk much about our shared Jewish heritage, but the understanding that we had this in common brought us closer together - and gave us interesting things to discuss. I remember Nat telling me about the moment he fell in love with jazz. He was walking down the street in his native Boston when he heard a sound coming from a record store that “just reached inside me and hit me like a chazzan swinging. I was so excited I yelled in pleasure…I rushed into the store. “What was that?” It was Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare,” which, years later, I found out that Artie had based on what was called a niggun, one of the melodies that Jewish chazzans [cantors] sang…And that made me realize that the only other music that had really hit me that hard was when I was even younger in an Orthodox synagogue and I heard the cantor, and they used to improvise very passionately…It was so powerful, so viscerally powerful…I knew the liturgy, but not that well - I had a feeling they sometimes argued with God. Like, “How come you’re doing this?” But whatever it was, that started what I look for in all music…what most moves me is what in Yiddish is called the krechts, the cry. And that’s what you have in all of jazz, one way or another. It makes you sit up and sometimes get up and shout.”
He shared with me how his hearing Ziggy Ellman’s “joyous, swinging, klezmer-like Yiddish trumpet solo” in Benny Goodman’s “And The Angels Sing” made him feel as if he had been welcomed into the jazz family. He told me too that, years later, he found out that Ziggy was imitating a cantor on his trumpet. (Not quite related, but this reminds me of a moment at a Herb Alpert concert in Cincinnati last year when Alpert took audience questions, and someone asked him about Stan Getz. Alpert shared that he once asked Getz what he was thinking about when he soloed. Getz told him that he was imagining that he was praying at the Western Wall.”)
Nat’s brilliant writing - and the Jewish stories he shared with me - made me, a then-young, hopeful jazz musician with barely any recordings and/or gigs, welcome in the jazz family, too.
As an example, here’s how he wrote about Sidney Bechet: And pounding out the beat, sending a blast of life through his long, straight horn, like the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, Bechet lifted these young Frenchmen as if he were a typhoon and hurled them into the music.
He loved to talk about Ornette Coleman’s experience listening to the music of renowned cantor Josef Rosenblatt for the first time and recommended Ben Ratliff’s book The Jazz Ear, which referenced that moment: “I started crying like a baby,” said Ornette. “[Rosenblatt] was crying, singing and praying all in the same breath. I said, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t find those notes … they don’t exist.’”
He elaborated on this, explaining that “the only other music that had really hit me that hard was when I was younger in an Orthodox synagogue was the cantor…It was so powerful, so viscerally powerful…I knew the liturgy, but not that well - I had a feeling they sometimes argued with God. Like, “How come you’re doing this?” But whatever it was, that started what I look for in all music…what most moves me is what in Yiddish is called the krechts, the cry. And that’s what you have in all of jazz, one way or another. It makes you sit up and sometimes get up and shout.”
Nat, who called himself a “Jewish Atheist” and was proud of the fact that the documentary about his life was called “The Pleasures of Being Out Of Step," grew up in a very anti-Semitic Boston, and his love of being “out of step” came from growing up in an Orthodox synagogue but having his doubts about the existence of God. As he wrote in “Boston Boy:”
Inside [the synagogue], the fathers, and some sons beside them, are davening, praying, rocking back and forth, chanting, a swaying mass of sighs, the words of the prayers passionately blurred as they rise in the air, for each Jew sounds his own sacred rhythms. But instead of confusion, the prayers intertwine the same unmistakable meaning: let Jews finally be allowed to breathe without apology. And after a time, it is as if there were only one huge being in that room, a giant Jew made up of many shaking heads, each an insistent part of the whole. I find my father, who, without a break in his chanting, opens a prayer book beside him and points to where everyone else is. I try—for once I really try—to follow the words rather than fake it. But I am seized with a compulsion to dare G-d, who must be here if He is anywhere on this day, to strike me dead if He exists. Here I am, I say inside my head, on the Day of Atonement in a shul, and I do not believe in you. Show yourself. Destroy me. But the davening went sighingly on, and I greatly resented His indifference.
And here he is describing one Yom Kippur:
Eating a huge salami sandwich very slowly, I sit in the middle of the morning on our porch, which overlooks Warren Street, around the corner from Howland. Warren Street is the main route to our shul, our synagogue, a block away. It is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the day of fasting, the day on which God marks down the fate of every Jew for the year ahead. Some of the Jews who look up at the slovenly, munching boy on the porch shake their heads in disgust. I stare at them, taking another bite. One old man, with a white beard almost as long as our rabbi’s, shakes his fist at me. Another old man spits. This despicable twelve-year-old atheist is waiting to be stoned. Hoping to be stoned. But not hit. I am, you see, protesting a stoning, or so I will say later that day when my father has discovered how his only son has spent the morning of the holiest day of the year disgracing himself and his father. By then, I am sick. Because of the sandwich. Because of the look on my father’s face. But I will not say so. My father also does not speak, for if he did, he would disown me. My mother? I do not remember remember my mother having been there, but, of course, she was. She was never anywhere else.
And his Bar Mitzvah:
In those days Rabbi Soloveitchik, I later found out, frequently spent Saturday mornings in various synagogues to observe for himself what manner of new men were coming coming into Judaism. This morning, he sat down in the front row, and as I began to chant, the rabbi, in his deep, resonant voice, started chanting along with me. “If you make a mistake,” my tutor had told me, “don’t go back. Only the Jews of the regular congregation will know you have made a mistake. The rest, the Jews who show up only for the holidays and bar mitzvahs, won’t know the difference—if you do not show anything on your face, and if you do not stop and go back.” Now, I was thinking desperately, everybody will know every mistake I make, because Rabbi Soloveitchik’s sonorously clear obbligato is making all too unmistakable every syllable I should be singing. At the end, utterly spent, I finally dared to look directly at Rabbi Soloveitchik. I could read neither approval nor disapproval in his face, but as he nodded gravely to me, there was a slight smile. The Jewish people had survived my bar mitzvah.
He attended the prestigious Boston Latin School, which, in his words, was cruel and "accepted students without discrimination, and it flunked them—Irish, Italian, Jewish, Protestant, black—with equal lack of discrimination.” His first job in journalism was working for Francis Sweeney and her paper, the Boston City Reporter, which sought to expose corruption and uncover anti-semitism; Sweeney went toe-to-toe with powerful anti-semities like Charles Coughlin, seeking to counteract his influence. A catholic herself, she was threatened with excommunication when she criticized a then-powerful cardinal for staying silent about Catholic anti-semitism. Coincidentally, three Massachusetts Rabbis did somehow vote to excommunicate Nat from Judaism in 1982 for his protesting Israel’s then-recent invasion of Lebanon. Here’s what he had to say about it in Boston Boy (which he told me was his favorite of all of his books):
I only wished the three rabbis really had the authority to hold that court, that Bet Din. But rabbis these days have no power except over their own congregations, and that power can be removed, along with the rabbi, at the will of the congregation. Ah, but had this been a true court, and had the rabbis believed that each Jew, however Satanic, must be given due process, they would have summoned me to that motel room, and I would have come. And I would have told them about my life as a heretic, a tradition I keep precisely because I am a Jew, and a tradition I was strengthened in because I came to know certain jazz musicians at so early an age that they, not unwittingly, were my chief rabbis for many years. And in that motel room, I would be excommunicated nonetheless, for what could Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus mean to that court of assizes? But I would have been there, and I would have made my mark.
Frances Sweeney had a profound impact on Nat. In addition to teaching him about journalistic principles, she nurtured Nat’s sense of independence and his “pleasures of being out of step.” Boston Boy to her, and once remarked, “To this day, if I have an ethical problem, I sometimes think, ‘Now what would Frances Sweeney do in this case?’”
Nat and Quincy Jones
All of these experiences led Nat to be the great fighter and champion that he was. He told me about working on “The Sound Of Jazz,” a wonderful hour-long program on CBS in 1957 that featured, among others, Count Basie, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk, and Billie Holiday. Regarding Holiday, he told me that some of the CBS executives didn’t like the idea of having a black woman who had been in jail on the show and asked him to remove her from the program. In response, Nat threatened to pull the entire program if she wouldn’t be allowed on.
Fortunately for us, they let her remain on the program, which turned out to be Holiday’s very last performance with Lester Young. YouTube “Fine and Dandy” to watch this powerful performance for yourself. (Nat told me that Holiday gave him a big kiss on the cheek afterward and that that kiss had been the greatest award he ever received.)
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is the story that made me feel welcomed into what became the Neranenah family and actually inspired me to take on the role of Executive Director of this organization nearly five years ago. I remember preparing to interview for this role one summer evening, trying to figure out my vision for the organization if I got the job. While I didn’t necessarily agree with how the festival had defined Jewish Music up until then (a Jew playing music), I didn’t yet have my definition for the term, but I kept coming back to this story - and others which didn’t involve Jewish performers or composers but were are so deeply important to the music that’s shaped American culture. And in that moment - as I contemplated these stories Nat had generously shared with me, I had my epiphany:
Jewish music is not a genre of music. It's much more than that. Consider Jewish people like Alan Lomax, who traveled the country and the world documenting rural musicians, seeking along the way to convince them of their worth by playing their music back for them; or Milt Gabler, the only one willing to record Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” after Columbia Records and John Hammond turned it down; or Alfred Lion, Frances Wolf, and Norman Granz, people who are responsible for the documentation of so much incredible American music and got into the music business just as much out of their love for the music as much out of their hate for the prejudice they saw against the musicians they loved. These are people who preserved and championed the roots of black American culture, helping elevate street life to the realm of high art.
What’s interesting about the above is that none involves Jewish performers or composers, but all are deeply important to the music that’s shaped American culture. The stories are powerful, inspiring and Jewish, and it’s the story, I’m convinced, that makes the music Jewish. Jewish music is not only music composed by Jews and performed by Jews, but also music that has been influenced and expanded, in part, by Jews to make it uniquely American. These are stories that we can all identify with and celebrate together - for, after all, while this is a Jewish organization, music is for everyone and Neranenah embraces and reflects that.
I was lucky enough to experience Nat’s fighting side firsthand. Eventually, Nat did profile me in the Wall Street Journal, and it was interesting to watch how he fought for what he wanted. As he was preparing to write the piece, he’d often call and say that he was having a hard time getting in touch with his WSJ editor. After a month or so of this, Nat called to say that he wrote his editor a letter of resignation. However, he called a few days later with the news that his editor had finally called, basically begging him to come back. Nat agreed and began writing the piece on me. He turned it in and called me as soon as he had received his edits.
“They took out of the first paragraph,” he said. “We need that paragraph. It sets the mood for the entire piece.” He was angry. “Give me 10 minutes,” he said, abruptly hanging up the phone.
Ten minutes later my phone rang. “Okay. It’s back in, but I think this is my last piece for the Wall Street Journal.” And it was.
Nat was the first non-musician to be named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master - our country’s highest honor for a Jazz musician. A big fan of saxophonist Houston Person, he was shocked when I told him that Houston had not been named an NEA Jazz Master. I told him that, if he wanted, he could nominate Houston for the award. He jumped at the opportunity but asked me to facilitate his nomination and submit it online for him, which I was more than happy to do. He worked on a nomination letter for a week or so and then called to read it to me. His final sentence will always remain one of my very favorite sentences: "Houston Person is always as contemporary as an expression of love.” Whew…
I remember talking to Nat about a 2010 article he wrote in JazzTimes Magazine, discussing a book called “Jazz Jews” by Mike Gerber. Here’s a sample:
I knew Artie Shaw (birth name: Arshawsky), but never asked him about his childhood. What I found out in Jazz Jews is that, as a kid, he was often sharply wounded by anti-Semitism. That resonates with my having grown up in Boston, which was then the most anti-Semitic city in the country. In my Jewish ghetto, a boy alone at night ran the risk of being punished by invaders as a “Christ-killer.” I lost some teeth that way.
That’s when I became an outsider to the point back then that I didn’t go into certain Boston stores, because I figured they didn’t want to have anything to do with Jews. I’m still an outsider in my day job writing about civil liberties.
What I didn’t know when I used to talk to Artie Shaw is that he felt so marginalized growing up Jewish that, as Mike Gerber writes, “Those anti-Semitic episodes haunted Shaw to such an extent that having Anglicized his name … for years he avoided disclosing his Jewish roots to fellow musicians.”
Coming to New York, Artie Shaw had as one of his mentors Willie “The Lion” Smith, also mentor to Duke Ellington. Said Shaw during a National Public Radio interview, “Willie didn’t know I was Jewish. I didn’t tell him that.” The Lion, notes Gerber, was proud of his good student, Artie, all the more so when Sidney Bechet, who was particular about clarinet players, asked Willie about Shaw, adding that “this musicianer was a good bluesman.” Artie was being welcomed into the family of jazz. He certainly soon knew that he belonged there, not at all marginalized.
I’ll have more to say about Mike Gerber’s Jazz Jews in a future column. He also tells of Willie “The Lion” Smith getting bar mitzvahed at 13 at a Newark synagogue, and saying years later that “people can’t seem to realize I have a Jewish soul and belong to that faith.” That story is in my forthcoming book, At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene (University of California Press), due out in June. The Lion eventually became a chazzan for black Jews in a Harlem synagogue. I wish I’d known that in time to be a member of his congregation.
Towards the end of our conversation, Nat expressed regret over having been with both Artie Shaw and Willie “The Lion” Smith, and not being able to make this Jewish connection between the two of them. Our conversation led me on a hunt to find recordings of Willie “The Lion,” the cantor, and here’s a favorite that I found.
Nat’s work ethic was like nothing I’ve ever seen and will continue to inspire me throughout my life.
I remember calling to wish him a happy birthday on either his 89th or 90th birthday. He called me back the next day, apologizing that he hadn’t called me the day before. “For my birthday present,” he told me. “I just wanted a day alone to write.”
Another time, I was volunteering at one of the luncheons for the NEA Jazz Masters Awards and, after lunching with Billy Taylor, James Moody, Gerald Wilson, Roy Haynes and so many other NEA Jazz Masters, I walked Nat to his car. He told me that he felt like he had just attended a family reunion, but when I asked if I’d see him later that night at the big awards ceremony and concert, he said, “No. I’ve got to work.”
Around 2013, he started telling me about his health starting to worsen, but that didn’t seem to bother him as long as he could write. For the next year or so of phone calls, whenever I’d ask how he was doing, he’d simply say, “I'm still writing, and as long as I'm writing I'm okay.”
He never once complained to me until his vision started failing. It was heartbreaking to hear that this wonderful man who lived to write could barely read anymore. But he was determined to write for as long as he could. Even though he could barely read, he collaborated with his son Nick on articles in 2016, dictating his words to him; they even somehow managed to profile me again this past March, in what, I believe, turned out to be Nat’s final piece on Jazz.
I last saw him a few months before he passed when I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon with him at his home. I brought along a copy of “Invitation to Openness,” Les McCann’s book of photography, and it was thrilling to watch him light up as he’d see the faces of so many of his old friends.
I’ll never forget the way Nat spoke about Jazz. To him, it was the perfect representation of what democracy at its best could be. Think about it: each band member gets a chance to be in the spotlight with his or her solo, but that solo will only sound good if the band plays well and helps that solo sound good. Then, after that soloist’s chance in the spotlight, the help the next soloist sound good! A beautiful sentiment, Nat said that, “The essence of freedom is jazz, it is constitutional democracy when it works, complete collective participation. And it swings.”
Having a champion in Nat Hentoff is something I will always treasure. I remember him calling all excited one day, just to tell me that, while listening to one of my albums, his neighbor, enjoying the music from the hallway, knocked on his door just to ask what he was listening to.
He’s even partly responsible for getting me into writing. When I told him that I was going to play at New Orleans' Preservation Hall, he encouraged me to document that experience in writing, which was a formative experience on its own.
Nat taught me so much about music, writing and life in general. His words, attitudes and teachings have influenced my music just as much as the music of my favorite pianists, and his work ethic was quite instructional and inspiring, too.
As I look back on the things he taught me, I will forever be impressed by his commitment to writing and his fighting for the things that most mattered to him. His examples of persistence and, above all, always being himself, is something I learned a whole lot from and will stay with me forever. As I said, he was a fighter and a champion, and he will always be my hero.
I often used to take notes of things he’d say after we hung up the phone. Looking back through my notes earlier today, I found one particularly poignant note that pretty much sums it all up. I don't remember the context, but that doesn't matter: “You only have one life,” he said. “Why do something that doesn't let you be you?” Amen.