Legendary jazz writer, educator, and archivist Dan Morgenstern died on September 7th; he was 94 years old. He was head of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University from 1976 through 2012. Under his leadership, Rutger’s Jazz Archive grew into an essential resource for researchers, educators, and even musicians trying to track down source material. It now includes 200,000 recordings and 6,000 books.
Morgenstern first wrote about jazz in the British magazine the Jazz Journal in the late ’50s, with some selections of that early work being published as a collection in 2004. In time he became editor for several significant jazz publications, first Metronome, then Jazz, then DownBeat magazine. He wrote album and concert reviews for the New York Post and Chicago Sun-Times. He taught jazz history at Brooklyn College, New York University and the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. He published several books, contributed to others, and wrote world class liner notes for innumerable jazz labels, for which he would win eight Grammys.
He was raised in Vienna, but fled at age eight after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938; he found refuge in Copenhagen with his Danish-born mother. It was there he attended a Fats Waller concert and became hooked on jazz. Still just 17 in 1947, he arrived in NYC with his jazz obsession already in bloom. He became friendly with many musicians of the period, among them Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, and especially Oran “Hot Lips” Page. In decades to come he would come to know many jazz greats personally, and become acquainted with even more through study of their lives and music.
He considered himself a jazz advocate, rather than a “critic,” and appreciated a wide array of jazz styles—something he attributed to being able to hear Dizzy Gillespie and Sidney Bechet playing across the street from each other in late ’40s New York City. He advocated for the appreciation of both Bessie Smith and Ornette Coleman. Importantly, he helped to take back Louis Armstrong’s proper legacy from detractors and shine a new light on Armstrong’s work in the ’30s and ’40s. Dan Morgenstern was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2007. Between 2017 and 2019 he sat with Michael Steinman for around 100 interviews about his life, musicians he had known, and his thoughts on jazz, they can be found on YouTube at www.youtube.com/@swingyoucats.
