This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 16th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

Last week we at the Cato Institute were saddened to learn of the passing of our colleague,

the journalist Nat Hentoff.

I spoke with Scott Bullock, president of the Institute for Justice about Hentoff's powerful legacy

and his twin loves of jazz in the Constitution.

You knew Nat Hentoff in a way that a lot of us here at Cato know Nat Hentoff, which is mostly

by phone.

And I would occasionally have phone calls with him, and we would talk about music.

We would talk about the things that he was writing, we would talk about all sorts of things.

And he always had some incredible story to go along with almost anything you could possibly mention.

In particular, he, I remember, I had a conversation, I said, yeah, I like jazz a lot, but I'm more of a bluegrass guy I play the banjo a little bit and he goes

well let me tell you in the 1950s I went on tour with flat and Scruggs and I was just I was absolutely in heaven hearing this this story about this you know

little fuzzy-headed guy with a pipe traveling through throughout the south with

flattened scrugs but that was like that was fairly typical he was well

acquainted with all manner of musical figures and wrote extensively about them.

Yeah, it was it was amazing the amount of people that he knew the experiences that he had in the music world, even leaving aside

all the great writings he did about the Constitution.

And it was primarily jazz, but you're mean he he was one of the early writers about

Bob Dylan and he wrote the liner notes to the freewheeling Bob Dylan that's right and and

had a sense of experience in country music as well wonderful profiles of

Merle Hagard but his experience with the jazz musicians is really

legendary as well.

...