Hentoff could write prose well, but he also strove to include the voices of the musicians. The chapter on Charlie Parker in Jazz Is (“The Great Speckled Bird”) is introduced by two pages of provocative commentary from Cootie Williams, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, John Lewis, and Ralph Ellison.

His jazz critic peers rarely addressed the topic of race, but Hentoff tries to get in there, for example in this chapter on Charlie Parker, which ends up partly a meditation on how being black must have interacted with Bird’s self-destructive behavior. It’s all pretty strong stuff even today, let alone in 1976.

Inevitably, Jazz Is has some dated passages, and as much as I love how Hentoff quotes his heroes, at times there are just too many quotes within a chapter. (Not the only time this happens in Hentoff.) However, his essential reverent relationship with the music is absolutely correct, and the technical and aesthetic judgements about his favorite musicians are essentially correct as well.

Jazz history would be immensely poorer without Nat Hentoff’s passionate contribution.