This could have been posted in the still dead thread but it fits here better I think:
prolific-author-and-jazz-writer-nat-hentoff-dies-at-91
From above link:
He [Nat] also was a lover and frequent writer on jazz music. From age 11, he was hooked on the genre after hearing the song "Nightmare" by Artie Shaw coming through an open door at a record store.
"It just reached inside me," Hentoff told NPR's Guy Raz in 2010. "I rushed into the store, 'What was that?' "
Over the six decades he spent covering jazz, he attended plenty of performances and met many musicians.
He "got to be very good friends" with jazz great Dizzy Gillespie. At one point, he sat in on a recording session featuring Abbey Lincoln, Coleman Hawkins and Max Roach. "The music just became part of you as you heard it," Hentoff said of the experience.
His most memorable show he attended was Duke Ellington "with his full orchestra" at Symphony Hall in Boston, playing the jazz work "Black, Brown and Beige." "It was the history of black people in the United States from slavery to the present," Hentoff told NPR in 2010. "And it was so extraordinary. At the end ... people were so moved they could barely applaud until they gave a standing ovation."
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