A Documentary on the Jazz Advocate and Candid Records Producer
I asked the 57-year-old spouse of an in-law who was visiting over Easter weekend if Nat Hentoff’s name rang a bell? “Sure,” she replied, “I learned about jazz reading his liner notes.” I could have answered the same if asked that question at any time in the past 45 years. For before I became familiar with him as a Village Voice columnist, as a New Yorker staff writer (where his profiles ranged from Bob Dylan to Cardinal O’Connor), and as the producer of recordings by Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Lightnin’ Hopkins, I knew Hentoff as a prolific and perceptive guide to the artists whose music was contained inside the jackets of the great jazz labels: Blue Note, Impulse, Contemporary, and most of the others.
Nat became prominent as the editor of Downbeat (the gig that brought him from his native Boston to New York in 1953); as the author and/or editor of several essential jazz texts (The Jazz Makers; Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya’; The Jazz Life); and as a founding editor of The Jazz Review, the short-lived, highly acclaimed periodical that showcased musicians, as well as critics and historians, writing on the music. The December 1959 edition, for example, has Bill Crow writing on fellow bassist Wilber Ware; Art Farmer on Coleman Hawkins; and Gunther Schuller on early Duke Ellington. (The Jazz Review is now available on-line in its original layout.)
In more recent years, Hentoff’s written for the Wall Street Journal, and for a couple of decades he had a back page column in Jazz Times, where he wrote on emerging musicians, old masters (i.e., friends), and topical matters. (Bless him, it’s there where he plugged a Wynton Marsalis feature of mine.) His musings often begin with an exchange he had with Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Pee Wee Russell or Dizzy Gillespie. In the best sense of the word, Nat’s a name-dropper, but it’s invariably in the service of an idea or insight, as Hentoff has a gift for conveying something of the humanity of the giants he’s known and of their effect on him. Of the cantorial-like cry he heard in Ornette Coleman’s saxophone playing, he said, “It jolted me back to when I was a boy, sitting next to my father, in a shul in Boston’s Jewish ghetto.” His two-word encapsulation of Lester Young’s style is indelible: “pulsating ease.”
Hentoff gets good stories because he’s a good listener, concerned for the quality and character of the lives of his musical heroes. (He titled a volume of his profiles of jazz and country musicians, Listen to the Stories). In The Pleasures of Being Out of Step, a documentary about Nat that’s next in the Jazz a la Mode Film Series on April 20 at Amherst Cinema, Phil Woods says it plain: “When musicians saw Nat enter the room, they didn’t think, ‘Ah, here comes a critic.’ They said, ‘Here comes a friend of the music’.” To no one’s surprise, when the NEA established Jazz Advocate as a special category in its prestigious Jazz Masters awards in 2003, Hentoff was its first recipient.
The Northeastern University alum may be even better known as a friend of the First Amendment. “The Constitution and jazz are my reasons for being,” he declares over the sounds of Duke Ellington’s “What Am I Here For?” in David L. Lewis’s documentary. “The First Amendment is a way of life.” He says it was the highly individual expressiveness of jazz players that fostered his reverence for democracy and everyone’s right to speak. His Village Voice column was devoted to that principle for fifty years, and that’s what drew Lewis to his subject. The filmmaker, a former producer at 60 Minutes, knew nothing of Hentoff’s jazz writing. He told The New York Times, “I went to high school in Westchester in the 1970s, reading Hentoff at the time. His voice always stood out in what was such an awful period in public life—Watergate, post-Vietnam, the Church Commission, FBI abuses, malaise—and he was writing about all of it, so I always knew who he was.”
Among the sources seen discussing Hentoff are the writers Stanley Crouch and the late Amiri Baraka, First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, and Nat’s wife Margot Hentoff. There’s a great clip of him squaring off against William F. Buckley, Jr. on a Firing Line episode devoted to civil rights and Black Power. Dan Morgenstern is seen poring through the record library of the Institute of Jazz Studies, where he chooses a quote from Hentoff’s liner essay for Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain to illustrate Nat’s insightful prose: “Miles plays with an authenticity that is neither strained nor condescending.” Stanley Crouch lauds his work as a producer at Candid Records. “Some of those records are as good as any record made at any time,” and adds that while critics often feel they’d make the best producers, “Nat Hentoff proved that he could.”
Candid was a subsidiary of Cadence Records. The label was doing well with Julius LaRosa, Andy Williams, and the Everly Brothers when its founder, pianist Archie Bleyer, hired Hentoff to launch a jazz label. (In 1962, after Candid had folded, Cadence released a Kennedy family parody called The White House by Vaughn Meader. It was the biggest and fastest selling record in history at the time.) Hentoff wrote about the Candid venture in his memoir, Speaking Freely. “The fantasy was common to jazz buffs, as we used to be called. Someday, somehow, I would have my own record label and record my favorite musicians. The releases would be pure jazz, and therefore would last for generations. Untold numbers of people all around the world would remember my name gratefully.”
Nat’s speaking tongue-in-cheek here, for by 1997, when Speaking Freely was published, Candid had more than stood the test of time. Though it was in operation for less than two years, Hentoff captured some of the most vital music of the era, ranging from politically-charged works by Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Charles Mingus; to career milestones by Clark Terry, Booker Ervin, Jaki Byard, Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor, Booker Little, and Phil Woods; to classic blues by Memphis Slim, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Otis Spann.
Recording Spann was a veritable public service, as the pianist, one of the greatest in blues history, had recorded only two singles by 1960, seven years into his long tenure with Muddy Waters. Nat had heard Spann with Muddy at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, and he made up for lost time by recording over twenty titles by the pianist and his collaborators St. Louis Jimmy Oden and Robert Jr. Lockwood. That’s Lockwood playing guitar with Spann singing the Big Maceo blues classic, “Worried Life Blues.”
Hentoff’s jazz tastes were as catholic as anyone’s at the time, and I can testify to what a model they were for me. His opposition to cant of any kind, including the notion that jazz must be progressive and innovative to be of value, was especially inspiring to me as a young fan finding myself drawn equally to Dave McKenna, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane. In his Boston youth, where he spun jazz records at WMEX and made the rounds of the Savoy, Storyville, and the Hi-Hat, he grew as fond of old school clarinetists Edmond Hall and Pee Wee Russell as he did the modernists. At Candid, he struck a balance between traditionalists and iconoclasts, and recruited Pee Wee and Coleman Hawkins to make their first session together since the historic Mound City Blue Blowers date of 1929. Jazz Reunion produced this poignant blues that Russell named for his wife Mary.
The best known of the Candid releases are also the most political. We Insist: Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite; Abbey Lincoln’s Straight Ahead; and Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus. Fifty-five years later, Roach’s magnum opus is still the most fully realized work of a political nature in jazz history. Combining the drummer’s music and Oscar Brown’s Jr.’s lyrics in support of the civil rights movement in the U.S. and the nascent anti-apartheid movement in South Africa (where the record was banned), Freedom Now’s sense of urgency is made all the more insistent by the boldness of Lincoln’s singing and the whap! of Max’s drumming. We Insist and Lincoln’s Straight Ahead announced Abbey’s transformation from supper club chanteuse to what Hentoff described as “the Abbey Lincoln she had long wanted to be,” a soul-bearing voice of liberation.
Mingus Presents Mingus includes “Original Faubus Fables,” Mingus’s riotous lampoon of Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus, the segregationist who blocked the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. Faubus’s resistance prompted President Eisenhower to send in the National Guard, though not before Louis Armstrong, in the most controversial statement of his career, called him out for inaction. Mingus had first recorded the work as an instrumental for Columbia in 1959; the label objected to including his lyric decrying “Nazi fascist supremacists,” and the chant of “Two four six eight/They brainwash and teach you hate.” There was no such resistance coming from Hentoff.
Nat’s most recent volume of writings was the 2010 publication, At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene. In his epilogue, “My Life Lessons,” he says, “The Candid recording that means the most to me was made in 1961 by twenty-three-year-old [trumpeter] Booker Little…I knew he’d be a shaper of the future of jazz because of his vision…and his sound reminded me once again of what Duke Ellington had told me: ‘A musician’s sound is his soul’.” Alas, Booker died of uremia only six months after he’d recorded Out Front. Nat says he was “startled” when Booker dedicated his composition, “Man of Words,” to him. “It was his description– in sounds, dynamics, and rhythms– of the writing process.” True to form, Hentoff jumps from his memory of Booker to a concluding paragraph in which cornetist Jimmy McPartland relates a story about Bix Beiderbecke. For Nat Hentoff, every lick of this music is fresh, valid, interconnected, and loaded with surprise.