"I'm still somewhat overwhelmed at having been shown this great honor, but of course proud and delighted, especially so since this is in recognition of Jazz Advocacy. Like everyone who writes about jazz, which still is one of the things I do, I’ve been called a critic, but never really liked that term; I much prefer advocate. It’s a blessing to have been able to make a living and a life involved with something one loves, and the music has never lost its magic; I first got involved as a fan and I still am, of the music, of the wonderful artists who create it, (and so many of whom I’ve been lucky to get to know), and of the precious legacy that I’ve been privileged to help collect, preserve, and share. Jazz brings people together; it’s America’s gift to the world.”

Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University since 1976, Dan Morgenstern is a jazz historian and archivist, author, editor, and educator who has been active in the jazz field since 1958. The Institute of Jazz Studies is the largest collection of jazz-related materials anywhere.

Born in Germany and reared in Austria and Denmark, Morgenstern came to the United States in 1947. He was chief editor of DownBeat from 1967 to 1973, and served as New York editor from 1964; prior to that time he edited the periodicals Metronome and Jazz. Morgenstern is coeditor 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. 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, Dictionary of American Music, African-American Almanac, and 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; was a cofounder 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, 2006, and 2009). He received ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award for Jazz People in 1977 and in 2005 for Living with Jazz.

Selected Bibliography

Jazz People, H.N. Abrams, 1976 (reprinted by Da Capo Press, 1993)
Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy (with Donald Bogle, Richard A. Long, and Marc H. Miller), University of Washington Press, 1994
Living with Jazz: A Reader, ed. Sheldon Meyer, Pantheon, 2004

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