Nat Hentoff, a journalist, author, champion of jazz music and passionate defender of civil liberties in columns he wrote for The Washington Post and Village Voice, among other publications, died Saturday in New York. He was 91.

His son, Nick Hentoff, announced the death on Twitter, saying his father died while listening to jazz singer Billie Holiday.

Over a long and admired career – he was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize – Hentoff was a writer and editor for the jazz magazine Down Beat, co-founded the publication Jazz Review, was immersed in efforts to bring jazz to television, briefly ran a record label, recorded major jazz musicians including Max Roach and Cecil Taylor, and wrote liner notes for John Coltrane’s landmark album “Giant Steps” (1960).

In 2003, he was one of the first nonmusicians to be recognized as a “jazz master” by the National Endowment for the Arts. Yet his interests went far beyond the realm of jazz.

Hentoff wrote for print publications ranging from the New Yorker magazine to the Wall Street Journal as well as Legal Times and the Washington Times. Late in his career, he was a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Through years of turmoil and turbulence, times of political divisions evoked by the Vietnam War, in eras of social discord and concerns about crime, as well as attempts to suppress dissenting voices, Hentoff was regarded as among the country’s staunchest public advocates of American Constitutional guarantees.

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In his columns on civil liberties, published in the Voice for a half-century and in the Post in the 1980s and 1990s, Hentoff sometimes aroused the ire of many who might have seemed his natural allies in the progressive camp.

At the same time, he unabashedly shared in print views that were dear to many who might not have expected to find him congenial. For such reasons, a 2013 documentary about his life was plausibly titled “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step.” On-screen, he declared, “the Constitution and jazz are my main reasons for being.”

“Duke Ellington used to tell me that ‘we gave the world the freest expression ever in the arts,’ so I always thought there was a natural tie there,” Hentoff told the New York Times. “The whole idea of the Bill of Rights and jazz (is) freedom of expression that nobody, not even the government, can squelch.”

Of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights, Hentoff was most closely identified with the First, the one that guarantees freedom of speech and of the press as he derided and denounced what he perceived as efforts at censorship by the left and the right.

Atop his column in the Post were the words Sweet Land of Liberty. Hentoff believed in applying the words of the Constitution in the most difficult of circumstances. Nor was the word “Sweet” to be overlooked. As he saw it, it was the Constitution that created American life, as he knew it and others enjoyed it.

Nathan Irving Hentoff was born in Boston on June 10, 1925, to Jewish immigrants from Russia, and his father supported the family as a haberdasher and a traveling salesman. Raised in a Jewish neighborhood, Hentoff said he showed signs of rebellion from a young age, pointing to the time, at age 12, he sat on his front porch and ate “a huge salami sandwich very slowly” on the Sabbath.

Hentoff acknowledged to the Times that he sometimes came across as a “gadfly” but that his passions were quite serious.


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