By Magdalena Hernandez

American Music Is
by Nat Hentoff (Da Capo Press; Cambridge, Massachusetts; 2004; 320 pages; $16.95)

Jazz, many have observed, is America's only truly original art form. Who better, then, to chart and interpret the sound's syncopations and stars than a legend of American letters?

Music critic extraordinaire Nat Hentoff, LA'44, H'85, has collected more than sixty of his short essays into a new anthology, American Music Is. The wide-ranging volume reveals Hentoff's encyclopedic and intimate knowledge of the variants of American "roots" music—blues, country, folk, gospel, and, most prominently, jazz. The common thread among the genres, of course: the essential national spirit that animates them all.

Whether profiling important artists or reviewing recordings that deserve a place in the musical canon, Hentoff—an associate editor at Down Beat magazine from 1953 to 1957, co-editor of Jazz Review from 1958 to 1961, staff writer at the New Yorker for more than twenty-five years, and longtime columnist for the Village Voice—imparts considerable jazz history.

Small wonder, then, the National Endowment for the Arts honored Hentoff with a 2004 Jazz Masters fellowship, the first time the award's been bestowed on a nonmusician. His energy, far-reaching scholarship, and ability to find connections among seemingly disparate forms (such as the link between Jewish cantors' songs and field hollers) are richly displayed in American Music Is.

Hentoff goes straight to the heart of musicians, describing what makes them special with a few deft strokes. Trumpeter Frankie Newton, he writes, should be heralded for his "intimately evocative and lyrical storytelling." As a pianist, Duke Ellington was "an orchestra unto himself." Hoofer Fred Astaire's jazz singing: "loosely swinging."

Or consider his exploration of the shades of Ol' Blue Eyes: "With the bands of Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra projected a self-assurance that was sometimes abrasively cocky, although on ballads he sounded autobiographically vulnerable. In Sinatra in Paris, the self-assurance is warmly collegial."

Moreover, like great music, Hentoff's prose has meticulous tone, phrasing, balance, and color. Carla Bley's jazz scores, the author writes, "are matched only by those of Duke Ellington and the late Charles Mingus for yearning lyricism, explosive exultation, and other expressions of the human condition in between."

Describing Willie Nelson onstage, Hentoff sees "a forceful, swinging presence, as country, blues, gospel, and jazz roots merge so that intimate songs . . . become proclamations rather than interior monologues." Such deceptively simple language—without a fussy music-theory term in sight—goes far in earning the reader's trust.

The author with the musical voice also has a great ear, and is quick to repeat someone else's beautiful summation. For instance, Hentoff quotes writer Albert Murray's assessment of a jazz titan: "I don't think anybody has achieved a higher synthesis of the American experience than Duke Ellington. Anybody who achieved a literary equivalent of that would be beyond Melville, Henry James, and Faulkner."

Another of the book's joys is its incidental narration of the author's development into a music writer and renowned First Amendment scholar. Hentoff says Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige "made me begin to see, feel, and understand the deepest and most abiding failure of this constitutional democracy." After Hentoff gave up his graduate work in American studies at Harvard—he was more interested in what Sidney Bechet was playing over at the Savoy Café than in studying at Widener Library—he realized the musicians he had befriended had become his faculty.

His insider's status gives him access to fascinating stories. After Miles Davis was criticized for hiring a white pianist for his combo, the trumpeter insisted that color was beside the point. "I don't care if he's purple with green dots," Davis told Hentoff, "so long as he can play."

Dizzy Gillespie's improvisational wit is on view when Hentoff describes the night in 1955 that Gillespie got arrested between shows for playing cards for money: "Besieged by the press, Dizzy was asked his name. He said, ‘Louis Armstrong,' and that's how it appeared in the papers."

Hentoff also shares lessons learned in the days before civil rights were extended to all American citizens. Musicians told him about seeing hotel signs that read "Coloreds can't stay—but they can play." During a stint in the mid-1940s as a DJ at Boston radio station WMEX, Hentoff managed to spin Billie Holiday's signature lynch-era plaint, "Strange Fruit," despite its having been banned from the airwaves. How? "The boss never listened to jazz."

There were similar Jim Crow inequities within the music industry itself. Hentoff notes some of the business's shadier dealings, such as the differences in recording contracts given to whites and blacks. Because those contracts often dictated royalty rates that reach into the present, many black musicians, sadly, continue to be cheated.

And, as Hentoff repeatedly points out, the music business still systematically silences women artists. Wynton Marsalis, for instance, conducts an all-male Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. And always has.

Oddly, however, Hentoff includes only a handful of essays devoted to women artists and their work. Granted, all the book's articles were previously published in either JazzTimes or the Wall Street Journal, and therefore reflect the tastes and expectations of those publications' audiences. But readers may reasonably feel somewhat frustrated that a leading civil-rights advocate doesn't shine more of a light on women artists still hidden in the shadows.

The fact that there's no clear reference in the body of the book to when each article was originally published leads to another kind of confusion—a 2002 concert, for example, may be mentioned as upcoming. Readers have to flip to the back of the book and find the credits, which date each piece, to regain their moorings.

But none of these problems stands in the way of a reader's enjoyment of this fine medley of essays. Novices and cognoscenti alike will find plenty to applaud. After all, music lessons from a jazz master don't come along every day.

Magdalena Hernandez, MBA’02, is a senior editor.

Hot Shots and Heavy Hits: Tales of an Undercover Drug Agent
by Paul E. Doyle; Northeastern University Press; 2004

Our city upon a hill has a seamier side. Just ask Paul E. Doyle, MJ'97. In 1971, he joined the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and a year later moved to the newly formed Drug Enforcement Administration. Doyle spent his career on Boston's mean streets, infiltrating drug rings during a turbulent era. This memoir recounts his years as a narc, combining frank exploits with an insider's understanding of both sides of the law.

Now chairman of the New England chapter of the Association of Former Federal Narcotics Agents, Doyle has penned a gripping dispatch from the war on drugs.

When in Boston: A Time Line and Almanac
by Jim Vrabel; Northeastern University Press; 2004

The Great Molasses Flood? The country's oldest public school? The original Ponzi schemes? Read about these notable pieces of a city's history—and more—in When in Boston.

Jim Vrabel, LA'71, has compiled a chronological list of firsts and major happenings in Boston. The result is a highly readable compendium. Though When in Boston recounts facts as far back as 1000, it is not intended as a comprehensive account—more a useful reference tool and trivia trove.

Vrabel's day job as a senior research analyst and editor at the Boston Redevelopment Authority serves him well here. This vivid volume will intrigue the Cabots and the Lodges, American history buffs, and other Bostonians of all stripes.