Dan Morgenstern was a jazz advocate in word and deed: as true an ally as the music, its musicians and its chroniclers have ever had, and I don’t say that casually. He died on Saturday at 94, and while his passing wasn’t unexpected, the news landed hard. Barry Singer wrote a fine New York Times obit, which I’ve “gifted” here; it rightly hails Morgenstern as “a jazz writer uniquely embraced by jazz musicians — a nonmusician who captured their sounds in unpretentious prose, amplified with sweeping and encyclopedic historical context.”
There was a time when Morgenstern’s byline appeared prominently, and with regularity, in the jazz press — notably DownBeat, which he also served as New York editor from 1964 to ‘67, at which point he became editor-in-chief, serving until ‘73. To state the obvious, that’s an incredibly volatile time period for jazz, and on his watch, the leading jazz magazine covered the music and its mutations with equanimity. It would be a fabulous service if DB were to compile highlights from his tenure in a commemorative publication, in print or online. Until such a time, Michael Fitzgerald has assembled this complete bibliography, which is really something to behold.
A more manageable place to start is the 2009 anthology Living with Jazz: A Reader, edited by the redoubtable Sheldon Meyer. Here we find a few of Dan’s exemplary liner notes — he won eight Grammy awards in that category — as well as fondly familiar profiles of everyone from Lester Young to Oran “Hot Lips” Page. But the most magical material in the book, unsurprisingly, has to do with Louis Armstrong, whom he knew as a close friend, and revered as an all-American genius. It’s hardly an overstatement to say that the high esteem now afforded Armstrong in our culture — the acknowledgment of his complexity, his courage, his resilience, his resounding commitment to giving the music his all — found a framework in Dan’s advocacy.
“Louis Armstrong was a complex and proud man,” he wrote in 1980, “who gave his life’s work (I should say his calling) everything he had — a reasonable man, but not one to be pushed around, and a tiger when his special people were pushed.” This essay, found in Living with Jazz, is so casually definitive on its subject that the following recollection appears entirely in a parenthetical.
(Louis had a way of “hitting something” inside people. At Newport in 1958, I was listening to Louis’ set with James Baldwin. As always, Louis concluded with the National Anthem. It was early in the morning — the show had run very late — and the music carried beautifully in the damp air. The crowd had roared for more, but now they were still. After Louis’ final golden note had faded, Baldwin turned and said: “You know, that’s the first time I’ve liked that song.”)
As the Times obit makes clear, Dan had perspective on the subject of freedom. He was born in Munich in 1929, and lived in Vienna until age eight, when the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria — the Anschluss — compelled his family to flee the country. His father, Soma Morgenstern, was a Polish‐born novelist raised in a Hasidic Jewish household; his mother, Ingeborg (which she shortened to Inge), was German-born with Danish heritage. He spent much of the war in Copenhagen, separate from his father, who seems to have survived only through an alignment of wiles and luck.
Dan’s upbringing in Vienna had been steeped in culture, on both sides of the family: his maternal grandfather was the Danish composer and conductor Karl Von Klenau, and his father, trained as a lawyer, had apprenticed with the theatrical director Max Reinhardt. The Austrian composer Alban Berg was a family friend; Morgenstern fondly recalled how, on his sixth birthday, Berg gave him his first 12-inch records, a set of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachmusik.
There’s a lot more about the Morgenstern family’s wartime movements in a riveting and remarkable Smithsonian Oral History (PDF) conducted by Ed Berger in 2007. I won’t even attempt to distill it here; just trust me that it’s worth the dive.
Morgenstern liked to recall that when he first came to New York in 1947, he made a beeline for 52nd Street. The same was true of George Wein, whose recollections of the Street sounded a lot like Dan’s. I had forgotten that the two men were so deeply linked by formative experience: in 1954, when Morgenstern was attending Brandeis on the G.I. Bill, he sought out Wein — then the proprietor of Storyville — for some help presenting jazz at the college. Stan Getz was coming to the club with a great band, and Wein gave the OK to book them on a Saturday afternoon. Morgenstern wrote an article in advance of the concert: his first byline. The following year, he made the same arrangement with Art Tatum (though he insisted on a solo piano presentation, and Tatum was playing Storyville with his trio).
I started working with George on his autobiography, Myself Among Others, in 1999. And through his introduction, I very quickly came into contact with Dan, who ran an incomparable archive at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. (He served as director there for more than 35 years.) During my handful of visits to the collection, he was always unfailingly gracious with his time and encouragement — making me feel at home as a researcher. Keep in mind that I was all of 23.
Over the years I’ve heard similar testimonials from many of the critics and historians I grew up admiring, like Gary Giddins. In 2017, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem hosted a succession of prominent jazz folk to pay tribute to Morgenstern for his 88th birthday, including Giddins, Wein and Randy Weston.
Among the many testimonials is one from legendary producer Michael Cuscuna (who we lost this spring). Cuscuna paid particular tribute to Morgenstern’s insights as an editor, going back to his own first assignment for DownBeat, a 1968 profile of Paul Bley. “I had taken writing courses with a lot of people, Joseph Heller among them,” Cuscuna says. “But I wrote this feature and I sent it to Dan, who was still in Chicago at the time. And it came back full of red ink. And I just dove into it, and in spending two hours with that manuscript and his comments and his changes, I learned more about writing than [in] two years of creative writing and journalism courses.”
I never had the pleasure of a Dan Morgenstern edit. But over the years he did occasionally provide unsolicited feedback, in the manner of a jazz ombudsman. Morgenstern was famously critical of jazz criticism — he’d seen too much unaccountable vitriol over the years — and he bristled at being called a critic himself. But he had respect for the practice, and understood its crucial role. I remember running into him in 2006, when I was only a year into my run as a critic for the Times. I had written a review of Oscar Peterson (“gifted” here), in what turned out to be his final New York engagement, at Birdland. Dan was effusive about my approach in this review, which pointed out the serious limitations in Peterson’s playing, but with a foundation of empathy. “You handled that just perfectly,” he said.
One sad truth about Morgenstern’s jazz generation is a cycle of losses, like so many waves lapping at a shore. In 2019, when I wrote an obit for the trad-jazz saxophonist Bob Wilber, I quoted a couple of admiring lines from liner notes that Dan had written. He emailed a qualified appreciation, in Morgensternian cadence:
Your obit is very good, but BW had such a long career that it’s nearly impossible to mention everything in less than the amount of space the Times gave to Toni Morrison (as much, no kidding, as to a presidential obit), but to me the edition of the Wildcats, ca. 1948-49, was a milestone in Bob’s career but also a jazz landmark, insofar as it consisted of his contemporary Dick Wellstood and four veteran black guys with a most impressive past, trumpeter Henry Goodwin, trombonist Jimmy Archey, bassist Pops Foster and drummer Tommy Benford, whose CVs were a veritable Who’s who of jazz, including King Oliver and Jelly Roll and Armstrong.
The following year, Michael Cogswell, the founding Executive Director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, died unexpectedly of cancer, at 66. I called Dan for comment, and we ended up having a long and soulful conversation. A few of his insights found their way into my obit for Cogswell, but what I remember most is the mellow warmth that Dan exuded even in a moment of grief and isolation — this was April 2020, when the realities of pandemic life were just starting to settle in.
One year later, we lost George Wein, at 95. His family and closest friends gathered for a memorial celebration at City Winery on Pier 57 in Lower Manhattan. Here is a moment from early in the evening, with Dan and Peter Keepnews, a veteran jazz journalist and longtime editor on the Obituaries desk at the Times. Peter is the person who wrote Wein’s obit, and I have no doubt that he’s the reason Dan received such timely and thorough coverage in the paper.
There is sadness in this memory, of course, but I also find it heartening — because Dan Morgenstern left his mark, and we’ve all benefited from his life’s work, whether or not it goes widely appreciated. True heads will always know.
Extra Choruses
I considered “Dan Morgenstern, Jazz Mensch” as the subject for this post. It felt insufficiently serious — but when you actually look up the dictionary definition of Mensch, you get “a person of integrity and honor.” That’s Dan.
When I wrote about Morgenstern’s contribution to Armstrong scholarship, I forgot about this tribute on the subject from
last year. Worth a read, especially for the comments from Giddins.The photograph at the top of this post comes from a visit that Morgenstern paid to the Armstrong household in 1965. Ricky Riccardi, Director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum, has more about that visit (“The Slivovice Interview”) in this online exhibition from 2020.
When Dan Morgenstern was selected for an NEA Jazz Master fellowship, he sat for an oral history interview with Molly Murphy and Katja von Schuttenbach. Scroll down on the page, and you’ll find a transcript and audio excerpts; it’s a fine complement to the Smithsonian interview linked above.
I learned of Dan’s passing from a Facebook post by Loren Schoenberg, the Founding Director and Senior Scholar at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem; I’m sure that his feed will be the place to learn of future tributes.
That’s all I have for now. My love and condolences to everyone who loved Dan Morgenstern — a long list, to be sure. We’ll all do well to keep his example clear in mind, and keep some Pops within easy reach of our stereo.
This is a lovely tribute to a man who didn’t play the music on an instrument, but encouraged us to listen, and if moved, try it on. Dan Morgenstern as a jazz historian and critic has helped our beloved music remain revered by many as our indigenous art form. The links in this piece lead to magical places.