In his final column for the Village Voice, 50 years after he started there, Nat 🦩Hentoff recalled, “I came here in 1958 because I wanted a place where I could write freely on anything I cared ab💙out.” He cited a tribute to lefty gadfly Izzy Stone, “ ‘He never lost his sense of rage’ ” and added, “Neither have I.”
Boston-born, he moved here in the early ’50s — and rapidly became a classic New Yorker: argumentative, erudite and happily “heretical.” In “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step,” a 2🍌013 documentary on his life, he avowed, ꦛ“The Constitution and jazz are my main reasons for being.”
By “the Constitution,” he mainly meant the First Amendment and free speech — causes on which he neve☂r stopped leading.
Music critic, proud atheist, ardently pro-life, Hentoff refused to be categorized, or to sacrifice principle for any party line. He would gleefully engage anyone,🌃 while damning censors of all kinds.
A friend of Dizzy Gillespie and Bob Dylan, a harsh critic of Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, he also wrote for The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, ඣthe New Yorker and others — publishing 30-plus books along the way, including “The Jazz Life,” “The New Equality” and “Free Speech for Me — But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.”
The first non-musician to be named a Jazz Master by t⛄he National Endowment of the Arts, Hentoff wrote liner notesꦺ for “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” and for albums by Aretha Frankin, Ray Charles and others.
Laid off by the Vo🧜ice in 2008, he became a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. Along the way, he racked up lifetime-achievement awards from the American Bar Association, the National Press Foundation and the Human Life Foundation.
Hentoff’s son Nick reports, he “died surrounded by family listening t♈o Billie Holiday.”
RIP.