Nat Hentoff has been a lover of jazz nearly his whole life and has written about the jazz scene forever. This book is a collection of 65 small essays on musicians and their music: Dizzy, Ellington, Monk, Coltrane, Davis, Parker...and dozens, hundreds more. For anyone at all interested in jazz, the book is filled with vignettes and musings of a lifetime talking with jazzmen and women (a few) and listening to thousands of performances, jam sessions, concerts, classes.... He wrote for JazzTimes and DownBeat and The Wall Street Journal.
He tells of the Jazz Foundation of American which provides "emergency help to the sick, elderly or out-of-fashion jazz musicians" and was on the ground after Katrina, or of the Jazz at Lincoln Center program which has "WeBop! classes...for children from eight months to five years, along with their parents..." as one of many offerings to the public. He pleads for more jazz education in our school. He has heard Obama has Coltrane on his iPod and that John Conyers has "recordings by Miles and Coltrane [in his office] for when he "needs a lift..." Would that Oprah loved jazz.....
Not too long ago, the author went to the Blue Note in Greenwich Village for a tribute to 80-year-old Clark Terry. Terry "was making it up to the bandstand [having been helped out of his wheelchair] as someone in the audience shouted, 'How are the golden years, Clark?' Terry, trumpet in hand, turned toward the voice and said, 'They suck!' --and beat off the first number of the set. He played as if he were in his twenties....Jazz again had refilled me with life."
Before entering the club that night, Mr. Hentoff had felt "way low....meeting deadlines on the genocide in Darfur and about those parts of the Constitution here in the United Stated being on life support."
The power of music, whatever one's preferences....
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