MR: My name is Monk Rowe and we're filming
in Manhattan for the Jazz Archive at Hamilton College. It's a real pleasure for me to have Nat Hentoff
with me today, one of our most vigilant writers and observers of American culture I think
I can safely say. NH: Right. MR: It's also a real event for me interviewing
you because you did one of the first interview projects back in 1955. NH: Well you mean Hear Me Talkin' To Ya? MR: Yeah. NH: Yeah. That came about because the late Nat Shapiro
and I were very well aware that even among a good many jazz enthusiasts the notion was
that these people were very eloquent on their instruments but aside from that didn't have
much to say about public affairs, history or whatever. And if you talked to these guys you knew different. I mean Duke Ellington once told me oh I read
Walter Lippman but I've been there, I know what he's written already. So we thought of an idea where only the musicians
would speak in the book and that was Hear Me Talkin' To Ya. MR: Did you get a sense of the importance
of what you were doing at the time or is that all sort of later? NH: A sense of? MR: Of the importance of what it was. NH: I never have that sense. MR: No. Okay. NH: If I figure something ought to be done
I do it. What then happens in terms of history - if
we ever have a history in view of what the world is now - that's fine. But I don't do it in terms of the future. I do it just to record now. MR: Okay. When you used to visit the musicians at the
Savoy in Boston, could you ever imagine a time when jazz would have this sort of commotion,
all this great commotion here, like at the IAJE. NH: Well it's interesting. I was talking to George Wein and I knew George
from the Savoy, he was the house pianist before he had his own club, Storyville, and we were
talking about all this commotion. And yet, as he said, you ask even some of
the jazz scholars now, or followers, they don't really know much or care much about
Ben Webster or Tricky Sam Nanton or Pee Wee Russell etcetera. It's become almost a - not a business - but
there's too much of a focus on the cutting edge of things. And that's why I'm encouraged that jazz education
in terms of - I don't care if they become musicians but I like to see high school students,
elementary school students, learning who these people are and listening to their records. Because we do need, as any art form does,
an increase in audience. And we're not getting that so much. MR: That's for sure. You've got all these people playing and I
don't know where they're going to go play or for whom. NH: Yeah. I do hope that with all of this emphasis on
jazz education, that there will be an audience coming out of it. MR: I understand, going back to Boston for
a minute, that Ruby Braff gave you some advice on your clarinet playing? NH: No I learned - I was taking clarinet lessons
from an alumnus of the Boston Symphony and I was about 13, 14 years old. And I could read anything. And I was playing scales one day near an open
window, it was a summer day. And all of a sudden I hear a shout from downstairs,
I was on the first, second floor. "Hey kid, you want to go to a session?" I look down, there's this short kid and I
figured well I can read anything, so I went. And when we got there this kid took out his
horn and began to play and I knew then that I'd have to find a day job that wasn't in
jazz. It was Ruby Braff. Already - he was about my age - he was already
playing extraordinarily beautiful stuff. MR: I think it's a wonderful irony. In the beginning of Boston Boy there's this
great thing in the beginning where you talk about sitting at Harvard doing research and
you got a call in your head, Sidney Bechet, and that that ended your career to pursue
it. NH: Yeah I had originally thought - Harvard
at that time had a very good professor, F.L. Mathewson, and I think he was a pioneer, this
is so far back, in American Studies. And I thought I would get into that field
in terms of literature, poetry, music, etcetera. But the more I thought about it, and I knew
Sidney Bechet was playing at the Savoy that night, I knew that I wasn't going to be a
professor. I mean I thought I'd have summer vacations
and all of that stuff. Now I figured I'd have to write about this
music. MR: Well you did it very well. There's something about this, jazz musicians,
you called them your rabbis? NH: Well growing up, I mean, I was still in
my very early twenties and Ben Webster, who had left Duke Ellington, much to his later
regret, was on the road and most of the places he played as a single couldn't afford his
regular rhythm section. So we were in a club and the rhythm section
was trying but they weren't making it. So Ben swung the band. And in between sets we were sitting at the
bar and he gave me a lifetime credo. He said when the rhythm section ain't making
it, go for yourself. And I do that with editors sometimes. MR: Do you feel like you've always made your
life sort of on the outside. You had this observation that you see a lot
more of what's actually going on if you're an outsider. NH: Well my main job is a reporter. And I've just finished a piece for Jazz Times,
if anything I've done in terms of writing about this music is going to last, it won't
be my music criticism, it'll be the interviews I've done. My books are almost entirely about - composed
of interviews. Almost all my liner notes, and I've done a
lot of them, I don't do them unless I can talk to the musician. If he's dead then I look up stuff he said
to other people. So it's really, I see myself as a reporter
on the scene. And of course my day job, currently I'm writing,
as I've been writing for years about Sudan, now about the genocide, also about the genocide
on the U.S. Constitution and this administration, that's reporting. I don't write opinion pieces as opinions. I write reporting pieces and then at the end
I say what I think. But it's useless if I don't have facts to
go with it. Same with jazz. MR: Yeah. Does it aggravate you that there are 24 hours
of news on seven different channels, and the things that they don't cover? NH: It's not only that. This is an extraordinary paradox. There's never been a time in human history
when there's been so much instant access to information - or what appears to be information. As for news, the 24 hour news cycle is such
that the idea of reporting in teams or a reporter getting months to do a story, that's very
rare now. So what you get are, if not sound bites, quick
stories. And once something else happens - when I was
growing up in Boston the reporters had a phrase, follow-up. You all had to follow-up on the story. But there's not much of that either. And this cacophony of information, it's increasingly
on the Internet. Most of the newspapers, to stay alive, are
going increasingly on the Internet, and they're being contested by bloggers and they're multiplying. But there's no filter as to what you're hearing
from the bloggers is information or just unvarnished biased opinion. So in a time when we have access to all this
information I think there's more confusion than ever before. After all, Thomas Jefferson had to wait 'till
the ship came in from Europe to get the newspapers. He didn't seem to be much disabused by that. MR: I was about to ask, what has all this
done to our attention span? NH: Well the other thing is - and there have
been surveys about this and if you talk to people - people have all kinds of possibilities
on the Internet. And I think increasingly most people go to
those sites with which they already agree. Like when I was teaching journalism I'd say
if you're going to read The Nation you've got to read The Weekly Standard too. Otherwise you don't understand the complexity
of all this news that, you know, each side gives you their side. And if you read the New York Times you ought
to read one of the alternative papers or go on to, well what I do in the morning, I have
my own sites that I go to whether I agree with them or not. Like if I want to know what's going on in
Darfur I go to the papers but I find out by going to a site called Sudan Tribune. And that gives you five, six new stories a
day. But most people, they go to Daily Kos if they're
on the left or they'll go to a conservative equivalent etcetera. So it's not that they're learning more, they're
just increasing their own predilections. MR: You know I had an interview with Jon Hendricks,
it was almost ten years ago. And he made a prediction, he said the Republicans
are dead in the water. But this was ten years ago. And it took a while, but do you think he was
right after all this time? NH: You mean he predicted-
MR: He predicted that the Republicans were going to really like go down the tubes election-wise. But it was pre-Bush. NH: Yeah, unless he was really a prophet I
don't think he could have realized the terrible lack of understanding of what we were going
into on the part of the people like Rumsfeld, like Bush, like Dick Cheney, who is really,
he's really the president. I don't mean this in some kind of tabloid
sense. There's a very good documentary series that
comes out of WGBH, it's on PBS, it's called "Frontline." And I've done a lot of research on this. But a week or two ago when we were doing this
interview, they had an hour, with photos, with documentary footage, with interviews,
the main conceptualizer of the unitary executive, the president as Commander in Chief who really
shouldn't have to pay any attention to Congress or the courts, is Cheney. Because when he was Chief of Staff for Ford
he was very upset. He thought that the presidency was weak and
it should be strengthened. Well he is now in a position to do something
about that. And whether he was the chief voice to get
us into Iraq I don't know. I mean at the time I was in favor of a humanitarian
intervention because I'd been following the torture chambers, the mass killings and all
that, and we had reluctantly - Bill Clinton reluctantly went into Kosovo to stop those
mass murders. I had no idea they didn't know what they were
doing when they went in there. And the result of course is much worse. We created a civil war. The ingredients were there and there was that
kind of inter-religious homicidal stuff, but we've made it worse. MR: Wow. Do you think the democrats will be able to
make some kind of difference? NH: Oh, I am not very optimistic about the
leadership. By contrast, the Chairman now again of the
Judiciary Committee, Pat Leahy of Vermont, he knows what has to be done. He would like to set up some real investigations
of how the CIA got its power to engage in this extraordinary renditions, which has given
us a terrible image around the world where we kidnap people off the streets of Europe,
send them to countries - Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Syria - so they'll be tortured there
and give the CIA the information. The CIA has secret prisons around the world. If you work at it hard enough, and I did,
there was an order by Bush, shortly after 9/11, giving the CIA that power. But it's never been open. Leahy wants to find out. But meanwhile Harry Reid and Pelosi are having
other things in their mind and they're not much interested in all this stuff. So I'm not sure this Democratic leadership
is going to do much for us. MR: Well let me go back to your - I love this
book, Boston Boy. NH: Thank you. MR: You talk about your mother really questioning
almost your sanity about your choice of what you were pursuing. NH: She couldn't understand it. She said it all sounds the same, this jazz. And I remember when Frances Sweeney, who is
prominent in the book, died, the only way I could get some kind of consolation was to
play Ben Webster ballads again and again and again. And I almost drove my mother crazy. MR: Do you think she'd be proud of what your
accomplishments have been? NH: Oh I guess so, so would my father, just
because the name is around. MR: Yeah, as you said, there's a lot of longevity
here, you've been around for so long. NH: I was amazed, I went back to my alma matter,
Boston Latin School. And by the way, that was the one mistake,
factual, that Sandra Day O'Connor made in one of her opinions. She said public education in America started
in the eighteenth century. Boston Latin School was founded in 1636. And that changed my life, the six years there. This was the depression, most of us were poor. The rich kids went to Exeter or Andover. And the teachers, who were called masters,
didn't want to hear of any problems at home, whether we were eating enough. You learned or you didn't learn, or otherwise
you went out. And that was very useful, I learned to study. I'd sit three to four hours a night at homework. So I'm very indebted to Boston Latin School. When I went back there, this was about three
years ago, and nothing I could have envisioned was like this. They not only have a music division but they
have a very good jazz band with a very good jazz band master. And the kids were playing; the front line
were blacks, whites, males, females. When I was there it was all male and practically
all white, and they were playing Ellington's "Things Ain't What They Used to be." And playing Ellington is hard, because he
wrote for the individual players in the band, and they were doing it, they were doing it
quite well. So I said to them afterwards, gee, Duke would
have liked that. And they looked at me, "you knew Duke Ellington?" And I said look, I once told Beethoven someday
his music would be recorded. But it was such a kick seeing those kids play
Ellington. Because in my day jazz would not have been
allowed. MR: Yeah, you'd have been expelled for that. NH: I was talking to Billy Taylor downstairs
and we were talking about Howard University. And he was telling me they have a wonderful
jazz music program and of course Howard Law School was where Brown v. Board came out of,
but before that when Sterling Brown, the poet, the expert on the blues, was teaching at Howard
- he told me this years ago - Howard, like several other all-black colleges, would not
allow jazz because it came from bad origins. So Sterling Brown would bring in a Milhaud
piece, Stravinsky's "Ragtime" and then he'd say to the students, "now let me show you
where they learned that." So then he snuck in the jazz lesson. MR: I see. He had to go through the back door. NH: Yeah. MR: You talk about the individual sound that
Ellington wrote for, and most people seem to agree that the earlier guys - Ben Webster
and all that - had a real identifiable sound. NH: Well when I was a kid, after I'd listened
and when I wasn't working that's all I did was listen to the music, you could pretty
well tell who it was by the first couple of bars, whether it was an alto player, was it
Benny Carter, was it Willie Smith. Later on of course it was Charlie Parker and
later Phil Woods. And there is some of that now. I can tell Wycliffe Gordon, because when he
plays trombone that's the whole history of jazz in his way of doing it, which is also
very contemporary. But I remember - and I don't want to over-generalize,
which I'm about to do - some years ago I went to North Texas State college where they have
the most, I think, ambitious jazz program in the country, maybe even more than Berklee
in Boston. They have a number of big bands, all kinds
of small combos. And it was very impressive. But one thing was lacking. And later Benny Carter I heard went there
and I called Benny and I said, "what'd you think?" He said, "it's amazing, they can cut anything,
they can read anything. There's only one problem, they all sound alike." Now I'm not saying that that's the case these
days of people who are coming up, but there is, I mean the last - one of the last people
who had such an individual voice was Ornette Coleman. Before that John Coltrane. Before that Charlie Parker, Lester Young,
Dizzy Gillespie, on and on and on. That kind of individual voice is not quite,
it's going to happen - I'm sure it's going to happen I hope - but some of the musicians,
and this sounds like I'm an old man, but some of the musicians, like some of the writers,
are trying so hard to be on the cutting edge to discover something. And George Wein, I was sitting next to him
before I came up here and he was saying you know, how many of the people now who say they're
very much involved with jazz - not only younger people but they too - how many of them know
who Pee Wee Russell was? Who Dickie Wells was? Who Rex Stewart was? I'm hoping that with all the education going
on in the high schools and middle schools and colleges, that'll come back again. Because it's like saying well we don't have
to listen to Bach or Haydn or Respighi or whoever, that's sort of for all the emphasis
on history. It's not as much a living history as it ought
to be. And because there aren't enough of the new
and strong individual voices, that may be one of the reasons why, although there's so
much interest in jazz, the record sales are off, and - it's not dying, it's a music that
can't die - but there isn't the kind of large scale enthusiasm. Of course Milt Jackson had a point on that. He said to me, "how do you expect people to
like the music" and this is before the Internet, "if they can't see it on television?" And before Ken Burns' series there was practically
nothing on television except for the Timex All Stars, or Ed Sullivan, where Duke would
get to play two of his standards. And Whitney Balliet and I broke through that
once in 1957. We had the most creative producer in all of
television history, Robert Herridge. And he wanted to do - he said, "I want a Partisan
Review pure jazz show. I don't want anything because they're popular. You guys decide whom you want." So we had Basie and Monk and Henry "Red" Allen
and Roy Eldridge and Billie Holiday. I mean my God it was a fan's dream. And it was live. And it was sponsored. And during one of the blocking sessions a
page came over from the sponsor's booth and gave Herridge a note which he looked at and
tore up. And I said, "what was that?" Oh the sponsor says that we can't have, on
a Sunday afternoon (that's when it came on), a woman on this show who was in prison for
drugs. "You can't have Billie Holiday." So Herridge sent back a note that said that's
okay, I'm leaving, Balliet's leaving, Hentoff's leaving. So that was the end of that. But the show, so far as you can encapsulate
an hour of what jazz was and is all about, I think that show did it. And it was wonderful. People wrote in. There was a letter I remember, "it's so wonderful
seeing people enjoying doing what they're doing." And it was a revelation to a lot of people. That's the last show of its kind except I
talked Miles Davis into doing a show, he was down on television. He had been one of those all-star things. And I said, "meet this guy Herridge." So that was the program with Gil Evans in
which they did "Sketches of Spain" and then some small combo stuff. But until Ken Burns came along there was hardly
anything. But in Europe, there's a company called Reeling
in the Years I think. They just came out with I think eight DVDs
of programs done on state-owned European television programs over the years. Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, all kinds of people,
Mingus. And I would hear musicians coming back saying,
"oh boy did we stretch out there." There were no commercials, they really liked
the music and they let the people do it. And we still don't have that. MR: Well I sometimes fantasize about getting
in a time machine and going back. I'm like really jealous of the moments you've
had. And one of them was, I actually -
[audio interlude] NH: I was in the control room. MR: Oh God, is that perfect or what? NH: Billie came in right after. You know the background of that was Lester
was not feeling well. He was supposed to be in one of the big band
sections with the all-time sax section: Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, I forget who else we
had there. And he just - I said look, you don't have
to do that, and when you do the small combo thing with Billie, you can just sit down. And then she came on in a circle with Roy
Eldridge and Lester etcetera. He got up and in the control room, people,
as this was unfolding, had tears in their eyes. It was such a moment. Because they were looking at each other, as
Lester played. And they had been very close and then not
so close, and it was so personal and so intimate, and I was so glad we got that for the ages,
if anybody ever wants to see it again. [1957 "Sound of Jazz" Show]
MR: It was fantastic and the look on her face, you know the way she's just groovin' to what
he's playing. And I'm thinking like it must have been a
wonderful moment but also sort of anxious, like, are the cameras working? Are we getting that? NH: Oh Herridge did all kinds of stuff on
television. He did Faulkner, he did Conrad Aiken. He had his own free-form thing. And before we did that show he had picked
out, he knew, he was at CBS a long time, he picked out cameramen and women who could improvise. He said don't worry about being in the shot,
that doesn't count. The studio is the studio. There's no set. And never mind what you hear from the control
room. If you get a shot, use it. And that's why we have some of the shots in
there, like Basie listening to Monk and all that stuff. But Herridge finally fell out of favor on
commercial television and his last show was on PBS and he tried hard and he said to me,
"all these executives are in their twenties and they never heard of Lester Young." MR: Aw, gee. You think Lester just kind of ran out of gas? NH: He had his problems. He drank a lot, he used marijuana a lot, probably
heroin as well. And he died not too long after that show. It's interesting though, I did get to see
him and interview him maybe three or four years before then in his home in Queens, one
of the times he was off the road. And he was very lucid then, and we had a long
talk. And he was telling me, he says, you know I
never play a ballad unless I learn the lyrics first, because I want to get the sense of
what they had in mind when they wrote it. And I said, "well where do you learn the lyrics?" And he pointed to a stack of Frank Sinatra
records. And as I was leaving, he said out of nowhere,
he said, "do you like Dixieland?" Because he was the hippest guy around. And Dixieland was supposed to be for squares. And I said, "yeah, when it's good." And he said, "yeah me too." Then I found out later, his son had become
the second in command for a while for the New York City school system. He was Deputy Chancellor, Lester Young Junior. So I asked, I said, "you know I was at your
home." He said "I know you were at my home because
he sent me out to the movies because you were coming and he wanted quiet." But then he told me he said every time Lester
came off the road that one of the first things he did was to go to the school to find out
how the kid was doing. So much for the jazz men who don't care about
anything but the ambience of the music. MR: That's a nice story. This morning I attended a little clinic that
was entitled "Trad Jazz Alive and Well." And I think some of the people on the panel,
who I don't think thought of that title, they were a little bit like wearing their tongues
in their cheek. We talked about it a little bit, but do you
think trad jazz suffers from some kind of identity -
NH: Yeah it's not hip anymore. It's square. But if you listen to, and there's still some
in New Orleans, these New Orleans brass bands. There's nothing more thrilling than a real
New Orleans jazz band and some of these people can still play that. But Wycliffe Gordon, when he has a chance,
he can sit in with anybody, but if he sits in with some of these players who still can
play Dixieland, that's still exciting stuff. I mean Bach is not out of fashion if you like
classical music. There shouldn't be - I mean you talked about
my rabbis, musicians, when I was growing up - Ellington taught me something very important. He said to me one day never get yourself caught
in a category. I heard somebody on the radio talk about modern
jazz. He said I heard some of those things in the
twenties, some cats were doing that. You don't listen for the genres and styles,
you listen for individuals. And I've been doing that ever since. MR: You have five grandchildren now? NH: Let me count right. MR: This was a while ago when I got this. NH: Oh the sixth is new, she's a year old,
Ruby. And her mother is a pianist and piano teacher
and composer. I don't think she named her after Thelonious
Monk's "Ruby My Dear" although she knows the music. Yeah that's the newest one. MR: And how many sons and daughters? NH: Well let's see, my eldest, my first born,
Jessica, is now running three or four circuses in St. Louis. She used to be a trapeze artist, drove me
crazy, and a juggler and a fire eater on the streets, now she runs a circus. And it's a multi-cultural circus. The circus band has Klezmer musicians, blues
players, mideastern players, all kinds of - and her three kids, who are my grandchildren,
are all in the circus. The older one, who is now 14, she claims she
started when she was two weeks old because they brought her on it. And Jessie has different kind of circuses. She has a patchwork circus for older people. She'll teach circus arts. She teaches in the schools. And as we speak she's been invited to bring
some of her performers to Israel for an Arab-Israel circus. I didn't even know one existed. So she's very adventurous. Mandy, her sister, she composes, plays piano,
is a master teacher. Some of the people in New York only know me
as Mandy's father, their piano teacher. The two boys, Nick is an attorney in Phoenix,
civil rights, civil liberties, Indian law, hard to make a living but that's what he wants
to do. The brother is a partner in one of the most
prestigious Washington law firms, Williams & Connolly, that's Tom, and he specializes
in intellectual property. He sometimes vents the Washington Post, that
sort of stuff. And let's see, have I run out of children
- those are the four children and they have -
MR: Was it tough raising a family of four kids as a freelance journalist or did you
already have sort of a regular gig at that time? NH: You mean in terms of finances? MR: Yeah. NH: It was tough for a while because I got
fired. My one gig was at Down Beat when the first
child was coming along and I committed a wrongdoing. We were writing essentially about black music. We had no black employees, no black writers
in either New York, Chicago where the headquarters were, or in Los Angeles. The boss wasn't interested in the music at
all; he ran a printing shop but he owned the paper. He did not like Jews, he did not like blacks. And one day a woman came in. I thought she was black and we needed a sort
of a receptionist so I figured okay we can start with that. I didn't check with him. He found out about it and I was fired. Years later when I wrote about it she wrote
me a note and she said well you know I'm not black, I'm Egyptian. Well some of the theorists today would say
yes you are. But anyway that left me in a hole, and Norman
Granz was very helpful. He gave me a whole bunch of liner notes for
a hundred bucks apiece, and that paid the rent for a while. But I had to freelance. And the Village Voice was very important. They didn't pay us at the time. But I went there on one condition, that I
didn't have to write about jazz. Because otherwise in terms of the newspaper
and magazine editors, I was stereotyped, talk about categorizing. So I could write about anything I wanted to:
education, the laws, civil liberties. And that got me started as a freelance writer. MR: You know today, we were talking about
instant access, you know with the Internet and all that. As a reporter back then, how did you gather
what was happening? NH: Talking to people. That's one of the reasons I'm a heretic now. I refuse to use email. And it took - at Jazz Times it took me a year
to argue with them, I don't put my email at the bottom of the column, I put my phone number. I use the computer all the time for research,
but email, I learn so much more when I talk to people. I tried it for a while and all I'd get would
be canned answers and I'd have to spend an hour or two answering this stuff. So, well I'm a relic. I think in all the places I write for I'm
the only person left who still uses a typewriter. I will not write on the computer. I like the sound of the typewriter. MR: You called it "acoustic journalism," right? NH: Yeah. MR: It does, it has a sound to it. You know some kids nowadays, you imitate a
typewriter - ding - and they look at you. NH: But look what happens now, you've got
instant messaging, and it's showing up in school papers. And when do they learn to write English? MR: A couple of moments you've mentioned that
I think were significant musically for you, having the Count Basie band plaster you against
the back wall? NH: Oh yeah. Back in the fifties, that was not the loose
Kansas City style band with Lester Young and Buck Clayton. This was a powerhouse band. And going downstairs into Birdland some nights,
the sound came up like a thunderstorm and you'd sort of go back. It was an exciting band. MR: And Joe Williams was, at the time -
NH: Joe Williams was the key figure I thought in the band, except for Basie. MR: Right. NH: And Basie was, he never said this to me,
but I learned a lot from hearing him play about the importance of space. And later Dizzy Gillespie told me, he said,
you know it's taken me most of my life to know what notes not to play. Basie knew that. MR: What was it about that rhythm section,
actually going back now. NH: Oh yeah, Walter Page, Jo Jones. It was, the way I would characterize it, I've
often used the phrase jazz is a life force. Well the pulse of the music is the rhythm,
the swing, as some people would call it. And the pulse comes from the rhythm section. I mean some people can solo on the horn and
you still get that pulse, but in most cases you don't have to necessarily feel it. I mean Mingus would sometimes write in a way,
but always whatever Mingus wrote and had his guys play, you could feel the pulse even though
it wasn't explicit. And the Basie rhythm section, of all the ones
I've ever heard, you could feel the pulse of life. It's as if you were listening to their heartbeat
together. And the reason for that was not only Walter
Paige and Basie, but Jo Jones. And I remember once in Storyville in Boston
he got off the stand and he played with his sticks and brushes all around the room, on
the walls, on the tables, on the floor, and the pulse never left. It was just extraordinary. MR: He really took an interest in you, didn't
he? NH: Yeah, Jo Jones had a feeling that jazz,
if it was going to be played correctly, had to be played by people who were proper, that
is, who cared enough about the music not to dissipate themselves so they couldn't play
the music right. So he decided to appoint himself a kind of
mentor to what he called his kiddies. And I was very fortunate to be one of the
non-musicians. He sat me down once at the Savoy in Boston,
where I lived when I wasn't working, and he said, "you know, you've got to learn some
things if you're going to write about this music." And he taught me how serious to take it. Not serious in the portentous sense, but this
was important music. And of course his own background, I wrote
about him in one my books, he was just an extraordinary guy. MR: You seem to have a pretty broad range
of interests, and it's not just jazz. You've written about country artists too. NH: Oh, talk about - see jazz is a conversation
when it's working. And my favorite story about country music
is there used to be a club in New York called Charlie's Tavern. It wasn't a club it was just a bar and the
musicians would hang out there. And they had a juke box. And Charlie Parker would come in and he was
by then revered by the younger players. He was Bird. And he'd come in and he'd play the country
music. And finally one of the players got the courage
up and said, "Bird, how can you listen to that stuff?" And Parker looked at him and said, "listen
to the stories." And it's true, you listen to Roy Acuff or
Kitty Wells or the best of them all I think, Merle Haggard. And they told you stories of people's lives,
like the blues. You know I recorded Otis Spann once, who was
to me one of the greatest things that I ever had anything to do with. All you had to do was show him where the piano
was and just stand back. And he was singing and playing. And afterwards I interviewed him for the liner
notes and, well you know he was talking about the blues clubs in Chicago, and he said, "all
we do is tell people about their lives." And that's -
MR: That's the concept. NH: That's it, yeah. I just did a piece for the Wall Street Journal
on a 46-year-old guy named Barrelhouse Chuck Goering, who is half Cherokee, who learned
at the hands of Sunnyland Slim and Memphis Slim and all those people, and he sounds now,
I mean he keeps the blues alive. And he was telling me that he went to an elementary
school and was playing the piano and singing and telling stories about Otis Spann and not
only Otis Spann but Muddy Waters, who was one of his mentors. And a 9-year-old girl said, "how come we couldn't
hear about these things? Why are they hiding this music from us?" Well ask Clear Channel, when are they going
to put on Merle Haggard or Otis Spann or Muddy Waters? That's the problem with widespread corporate
communications. MR: That they sort of have a monopoly on what
is - NH: There used to be these free-form FM stations. Some of them still may exist. Well there is a network sort of, although
it's not a formal network, of Americana or Roots music, and that's where some of these
good country players can still get an audience. But in terms of hearing them in a big city
or even a medium-sized city, that's all taken over now. MR: When you mentioned producing, of the records
you've done, have you ever had sort of an uncomfortable situation where you felt you
had to tell some musicians that this is not happening, or you're playing out of tune? NH: Well I had the luxury, Archie Bleyer,
who was Arthur Godfrey's orchestra leader and has his own record company called Cadence,
and at the time it was doing very well. Andy Williams, the Maguire Sisters. And somehow he figured he owed something to
jazz, even though he wasn't a jazz player. So he asked me if I would start a label. We called it Candid. He offered me an office, I didn't want an
office. He said, "you can do whatever you want." And I'm sure a lot of what I did he didn't
understand, but I had total freedom for about a year and a half or two. Then his record company sank and that was
the end. Candid is still alive. There's a guy in England who handles it. Musicians tell me they go to Japan and they
see stuff we never even released here. But I didn't have much to say because I would
hire the players whose music I knew and I knew they would hire people they wanted to
play with. The only time I would ever go into the studio
- and usually my main job was sending out for beer and sandwiches and keeping time - once
in a while somebody would bring in a lot of manuscript paper and they'd get stuck. So I'd come in and say very quietly, "why
don't we try the blues?" And it always worked. And one of the tracks or two of the tracks
would be that blues, they would just play. But otherwise I mean Paul Bley wrote a book
and he said, "I wish A&R people did what Hentoff does, he just reads the newspapers." MR: That's good. When they'd improvise these blues then you'd
have to name it something, right? NH: They'd name it. See one other thing is, the leader of the
date was always at the final session, the final cutting session. It was his recording. I wasn't going to say what tracks we're going
to use etcetera. And you know for example one of the things
I was most pleased to do, because the guy died so young, Booker Little. He wrote most of the music, he played trumpet
on it, and it was just amazing stuff. You know I knew him first because he played
with Max Roach, but he had, talk about knowing a person's sound, he had that, even in his
twenties. And thank God he was out there, he was dying,
I didn't know that at the time, he had some form of leukemia. But he made himself come to the final session
and that's why the album is what it is. I'm under no illusion that I'm a creator,
I'm just a recorder. MR: Well you're a facilitator. NH: A facilitator, right. MR: Do you remember the first time you heard
Charlie Parker? NH: Yeah. I had grown up with Benny Carter, Willie Smith,
I mean Johnny Hodges. I was so in awe of Hodges that one day he
was coming out the back door, the stage door, of the RKO Theater in Boston. The Ellington band was there. I was so in awe I couldn't even say hello. I mean that sound, that alto, clear, full
alto. Then Bird came along. And it took me a while. And I was interviewing somebody on WMEX and
we had in those days those big turntables. I think there was 16-1/3 or something like
that. And I think it was Coleman Hawkins I was interviewing. And I was saying, "I can't hear this stuff." He said, "put on a Bird record." I had some there. And then he said, "listen." And I heard the conception. And he was my teacher. And after that of course, even now when I
put on a Charlie Parker record it's like a miracle, all those ideas coming out, it's
extraordinary. MR: Does that kind of - how do I say this
- does jazz effect the way you write? NH: Well the way I write is - Murray Kempton
who was a reporter/columnist who I learned a lot from, he used to say he wrote for two
or three people, like a conversation. One of them was Jo Jones. And I don't conceptually, but I write like
a conversation. I write as if I were talking to somebody. And in that respect I suppose growing up on
the conversation that is jazz may have. I don't know that it ever did in any kind
of intellectual sense. MR: When you go home are you a person who
puts on music? NH: Well what happens, I'll lead into that
with something Merle Haggard told me. Haggard knows an enormous amount about jazz
and when he has the right audience he plays it. He had an alto sax player once who was a jazz
player, who could also play country. His lead guitarist's favorite guitarist was
Django Reinhardt. And when I interviewed Haggard he mentioned
some New Orleans players that I never heard of before, I was embarrassed. I went home and looked them up. But I think he's sort of bipolar. And he said to me once that some days things
get so far down I have nothing to lift me up except music. And sometimes after several days of writing
about genocide in Darfur or what Dick Cheney is doing to the Constitution, I have to hear
some music to keep me going. MR: That's a great answer, it sort of anticipates
my next question because I know we have to wrap up soon, but how do you get up for every
day, of what you do. NH: I'll tell you, one of my mentors as a
journalist all right, there were two main ones. One was a great man who nobody speaks of anymore,
George Seldes, who was kicked out of Hitler's Germany, out of Lenin's Russia. He was kicked out of the Chicago Tribune. He was the most independent and perceptive
journalist ever. The other one was I.F. Izzy Stone. And one day Tom Wicker, who was then at The
New York Times was paying tribute to Izzy and said, "the thing about Izzy is he never
lost his sense of rage." And what gets me up in the morning is I go
through the newspapers and I get so angry that I'm ready to write. MR: Wow. If you could, if you got the old stranded
on the desert island - NH: I'm sorry? MR: You're stranded on the desert island and
you have five pieces of music that you can take with you. NH: Well one would be "Duke Ellington at Fargo." MR: Say it again? NH: "Duke Ellington at Fargo," you know, that
place in the Dakotas. The guys told me that they had a terrible
road trip, they came into town totally beat, and something happened. And you could hear it on that record and a
great man remastered it, Jack somebody or other. I'd have to have some Billie Holiday. I'd have to - I'd need more than five. I'd have to have some real blues, I'd have
to have Otis Spann, and oh well, there's so much, it's hard to categorize it. MR: Yeah, that's a tough question. So do you think the future for jazz music
is healthy? Is it possible to say that? NH: My main hope is that out of all - and
I never anticipated there could be so much emphasis on education. I'm not talking about how to play, you know
like the Berklee School of Music. I don't know if I mentioned this in this interview,
I was talking about it downstairs. There's a place called North Texas State college,
they have I don't know how many big bands, all kinds of small combos. There's one thing missing. And Benny Carter went there after I did and
when I asked Benny what he thought he said, "gee they could play anything, there's only
one problem, they all sound alike." And what I'm hoping is that in the schools,
elementary - I've played Ellington records and New Orleans brass brands for fourth graders
and they react to it, just like Barrelhouse Chuck played the blues. If you let them hear it, they react. So maybe they'll hear Ben Webster and Pee
Wee Russell and all of that. And in terms of the musicians, I mean somebody
like Wycliffe Gordon is wonderful. He's part of the living jazz tradition. He can sit in with anybody. You know his sound right away. I think there is not yet enough strongly individual
voices. There are some, but one would think in a music
as individualistic as jazz but as a continual conversation you don't need the leading figure. But I think you do. Armstrong shook up all the musicians, not
just the trumpet players. Lester Young did. The Basie band did. Ellington did. Coltrane did. Ornette did. Maybe we need another terribly strong voice. You know too many of the writers, I think,
and even some of the musicians, are trying so hard to be on the cutting edge. And I don't mean to put them down but I guess
I'm doing it. Dave Douglas is a man of great capacities
but he has so many different combos. He's trying to get so many different styles
across, who is he? And some of the music that comes out of Europe
now, I forget the name of that group that's a trio, can put you to sleep. But some of the writers get on it and Stuart
Nicholson, who should know better, he's a British writer who did a wonderful book on
Ellington just like Hear Me Talkin' to Ya, just people in the band talking. He says, "the next jazz is coming from Europe. And then he talks about this some Nolan music
in Scandinavia. Where's the pulse? MR: It's not swinging, ey? I often see the phrase jazz, America's only
true art form. NH: Well that takes care of Charles Ives doesn't
it, or Elliot Carter. MR: Yeah, and Otis Spann. NH: You see that's the problem with categorization. You go according to who the musicians are
that turn you on. And you listen to Charles Ives' music and
that's America. And Duke Ellington is America. So why put them into categories? MR: All right. Well lastly, are your kids proud of what you
do and have done? NH: Uh it's interesting. Well Mandy, the musician, I guess she grew
up listening to a lot of music so she and I talk about the music. When Ruby was born I sent her a copy of "Ruby
My Dear." The other, my son Nick, the criminal defense
civil liberties lawyer, he was never interested in jazz, and this is where I give Ken Burns
credit. When Burns did the series on public television
he did a masterful piece on Louis Armstrong, where he came from, what the music was like. And Nick called me up the next day, "where
can I get those records, that's great," which exemplified for me what Milt Jackson told
me years ago. "You can't talk about jazz becoming popular
music, it's not on television." And I'm convinced when people - I once played,
as I mentioned before, a New Orleans brass brand to a fourth grade class and the kids
started to dance, and the teacher started to dance. And that's what that music was all about. So I'm convinced that this life force will
communicate if it gets heard. And well anyway, it can't die so long as there
are some people that are going to have to play it. And the other thing about it now, when I was
coming up there was a romantic feeling that romanticizing feeling that jazz was a young
man's game. There was a book called Young Man with a Horn
that was made into a movie and the idea was that jazz musicians and in the St. Vincent
Millay's phrase, burn the candle at all ends. And if they live past 30 or 40 that was it. Bix Beiderbecke died young, Bunny Berigan
died young. Look at what we had today at the jazz masters
table. These are people in their seventies and eighties. And they're still playing. I mean Clark Terry has had cancer, he has
difficulty with his eyes, he has to be helped onto the stand, he goes around in a wheelchair. He gets on the stand and he plays like he's
22 years old. And one night there was a tribute to him at
the Blue Note in New York and somebody, as he was getting on the stand, "hey Clark, what
are the golden years like?" He said, "they suck." Then he got on the band and he was 22 years
old. The music can keep you alive. MR: Yeah. That's for sure. Well I'm very appreciative of you giving me
your time today. NH: Oh look, as you can tell I enjoy talking. But one of your friends, I was once in Joe
Williams' dressing room and we were talking about players who are no longer here, some
because of their own damn fault. And Joe looked at me and said, "you and I
are survivors." And I felt like I'd been knighted, that Joe
would put me in his company. MR: Well you deserve to be there, and I appreciate
your time and everything you've been doing and are still doing. NH: Well I'm glad you're chronicling this
because if we have a future - since the nuclear proliferation is now proliferating - but if
we have a future what you've done is going to be terribly important. MR: Thanks a lot, I appreciate it. NH: Thank you.
