Dan Morgenstern, a respected jazz journalist, teacher and historian and one of the last jazz scholars who wrote about the jazz greats he wrote as both a friend and chronicler, died Saturday in Manhattan. He was 94 years old.
His son Josh said he died, at a hospital, of heart failure.
Mr. Morgenstern was a jazz writer uniquely embraced by jazz musicians—a non-musician who captured their voices in unprecedented prose, enhanced with extensive and encyclopedic historical context.
He was known for his low-key manner and modesty, but his achievements as a jazz scholar were larger than life.
He contributed thousands of articles to magazines, newspapers, and magazines, and he served the venerable Metronome magazine as its last editor and Jazz Magazine (later Jazz and Pop) as its first. He reviewed live jazz for The New York Post and records for The Chicago Sun-Times, as well as published 148 record reviews as an editor at Downbeat, including a stint as the magazine’s editor-in-chief from 1967 to 1973.
His obscure liner-note essays won eight Grammy Awards. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2007 and has received three Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in music writing from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, two of them for his books “Jazz People” (1976) and “Living With Jazz” (2004). He has been involved in more than a dozen jazz documentaries — as writer, consultant, music consultant and occasional onscreen authority. Most crucially, he served as director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark from 1976 to 2011, growing the institute into the largest repository of jazz documents, recordings and memorabilia in the world.
“I don’t like the word ‘critic’ very much,” Mr. Morgenstern said several times. “I see myself more as a musical advocate than a critic,” he wrote in “Living with Jazz.” “My most enthusiastic early readers were my musician friends, and one thing led to another. I hope the best thing I learned about music was not from books but from the people who made it.”
German-born Mr. Morgenstern’s flight into the jazz clubs of Holocaust-era New York City was as extraordinary as any jazz journey he later wrote. “Most people, when they first come to New York, they want to see the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building,” Mr. Morgenstern said in “Jazz,” a multipart PBS documentary by filmmaker Ken Burns. “I wanted to see 52nd Street.”
That fabled street of jazz clubs was “basically a row of brownstones,” he recalled 2005 visit with jerryjazzmusician.com. “The first time I saw it, it was actually shorter than I expected. The clubs were smaller and a bit funkier than I imagined, but, as I found out, that was part of their charm.
He added, “One night or so in 1949 a friend of Jimmy Ryan’s and we stopped dating; The club was open till 3 or 4 in the morning then.” Sidney Bechet, the great New Orleans clarinetist and soprano saxophonist, was leading a quartet that night, he recalled, “and at one point Sidney sat down, pulled up a chair and put his legs up so he could stretch his legs. He closed his eyes and played slow blues for about 15 minutes. It was very wonderful. “
Dan Michael Morgenstern was born on October 24, 1929 in Munich to Ingeborg (von Kleinau) Morgenstern, the daughter of Soma Morgenstern, a famous novelist, journalist and playwright, and Paul von Kleinau, a Danish composer and conductor. He grew up in Vienna, where his father, the son of Hasidic Jews from what is today Ukraine, had settled after serving in World War I.
In the wake of the Anschluss, Mr. Morgenstern’s father escaped on one of the last trains to Austria and headed for France while Mr. Morgenstern and his mother fled to Denmark. When the Nazis arrived in Copenhagen, mother and son were smuggled out of Denmark by the Danish resistance and landed in Sweden in mid-October 1943. They stayed there until the end of the war, then returned to Copenhagen, where Mr. Morgenstern later recalled, “I really started getting into jazz.
Mr. Morgenstern’s father moved from France to New York City, where, in April 1947, the family was finally reunited. Dan, now 17, had not seen his father for eight years. Mr. Morgenstern later reflected, “We’re tossing around whether we should speak English or German.”
With his father’s help, Mr. Morgenstern got a job as a trainee in the mail room at Time-Life and then spent a stint as a copy boy at The New York Times before being drafted in February 1951 and, presumably, returning to Munich. for his tour of duty. After his discharge, Mr. Morgenstern attended Brandeis University on the GI Bill; joined the student newspaper, The Justice (which he would eventually edit); and discovered a very active Boston jazz scene, in which he immersed himself.
Along with some other student jazz fans, Mr. Morgenstern decided to bring jazz to Brandeis. In 1954 they approached George Wayne, who owned Boston’s top jazz club Storyville, and was to begin his long tenure as producer of the Newport Jazz Festival. Mr. Wayne offered the students to Stan Getz, who was to headline at Storyville. A deal was struck, and Mr. Morgenstern wrote an article about Mr. Getz coming to Brandeis for The Justice. It was his first published work.
“I hated most of what I read in the jazz press for a long time,” Mr. Morgenstern later confessed in an interview for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program. “I remember, when I was in Germany, I was reading Downbeat; I wanted to see what was coming out, but for the most part I was really disappointed. Writing can be very meaningful.”
Mr. After graduation, Morgenstern found a job as a copy boy at The New York Post again, and was quickly promoted to editorial assistant in the drama department, which also covered film and music. One of his first bylines was a review of Randall’s Island Jazz Festival in 1959. He resumed nightly patronage of every imaginable jazz club and hangout on the island of Manhattan, with occasional stops in the Bronx and Brooklyn. As a result, he began befriending musicians, among them tenor saxophone titan Coleman Hawkins.
“Coleman did a great deal for me in terms of establishing me in the circle of musicians,” Mr. Morgenstern recalled in a Smithsonian interview. “Coleman was famous for never buying anyone a drink. It’s not that he was cheap. He explained it to me once – he said: ‘You buy someone a drink. Then they buy you one. You stop drinking more than you really want to.’ ‘
“Coleman had this big, booming voice. Even in a noisy bar you could hear it over the crowd; his voice really carried. One night he called to me at Copper Rail, one of the Midtown musician watering holes: ‘Danny! What are you drinking?’ ‘ Everyone looked back and it was like my initiation.
Mr. Morgenstern became one of the most famous witnesses to jazz history in the late 20th century, being invited to jam sessions, recording sessions and late-night gatherings to which few “citizens” were admitted. He had a simple theory as to why.
“I was able to make friends with a lot of musicians who were a little skeptical of me at first,” he observes. “This was during a period when there was a vague thing that had to do with the acceptance of white people by African Americans. They had to check you out a little bit. But when they found out that I wasn’t born in America, my European background could serve as an opening. .
Mr. Morgenstern married Elsa Schochet in 1974; A recent marriage ended in divorce. They had two sons, Adam Oran (named for the trumpeter Oran “Hot Lips” Page) and Joshua Lewis (named for Louis Armstrong). All three escape from him.
Although he retired as director of the Institute of Jazz Studies in 2011, Mr. Morgenstern never stopped writing, listening or learning about jazz.
“I’ve had a long life, and I’ve been able to make a living and a life being involved in something that I really loved and still do,” he told the Smithsonian. “The moment I think I’m going to get tired of listening to this great music, I’m going to quit. But I still got a kick out of it.
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