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Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University since 1976, Dan Morgenstern is a jazz historian and archivist, author, editor, and educator active in the jazz field since 1958. As head of the Institute of Jazz Studies, he is responsible for the largest collection of jazz-related materials anywhere.
On March 8, 2007, an audience of friends and admirers of one of the staunchest advocates of jazz, heard this recent NEA Jazz Master discuss his life and career in jazz.
Born in Germany and reared in Austria and Denmark, Morgenstern came to the United States in 1947. After editing the periodicals Metronome and Jazz, he became the New York editor of Down Beat in 1964 and served as editor-in-chief from 1967 to 1973. Morgenstern is co-editor of the Annual Review of Jazz Studies and the monograph series Studies in Jazz, published jointly by the IJS and Scarecrow Press, and author of Jazz People (DaCapo Press).
He has been jazz critic for the New York Post, record reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times, and New York correspondent and columnist for England's Jazz Journal and Japan's Swing Journal. He has contributed to reference works including the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz and Dictionary of American Music, the African-American Almanac, and the Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year; and to such anthologies as Reading Jazz, Setting the Tempo, The Louis Armstrong Companion, The Duke Ellington Reader, The Miles Davis Companion, and The Lester Young Reader.
Morgenstern has taught jazz history at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Brooklyn College (where he was also a visiting professor at the Institute for Studies in American Music), New York University, and the Schweitzer Institute of Music in Idaho. He served on the faculties of the Institutes in Jazz Criticism, jointly sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and the Music Critics Association, and is on the faculty of the Masters Program in Jazz History and Research at Rutgers University.
Morgenstern is a former vice president and trustee of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS); was a co-founder of the Jazz Institute of Chicago; served on the boards of the New York Jazz Museum and the American Jazz Orchestra; and is a director of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation and the Mary Lou Williams Foundation. He has been a member of Denmark's International JAZZPAR Prize Committee since its inception in 1989.
A prolific annotator of record albums, Morgenstern has won seven Grammy Awards for Best Album Notes (1973, 1974, 1976, 1981, 1991, 1995 and 2007). He received ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award for Jazz People in 1977 and in 2005 for Living With Jazz.
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