NY Times interview w/Dan Morgenstern

[ghost of miles]

Dan Morgenstern interviewed

Keeper of the Jazz Flame to Get His Due

by Ben Ratliff

New York Times, December 24, 2006

NEWARK -- Dan Morgenstern, 77, is the head traffic controller of jazz history.

There are others who may know more facts within a specific constellation of jazz

knowledge -- say, Dizzy Gillespie's state-department tour in 1956, or the

Central Avenue nightclubs in Los Angeles during the 1940s. But Mr. Morgenstern,

the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, is the one

with the map of the universe. He knows who knows what.

Next year the National Endowment for the Arts will honor Mr. Morgenstern's work

with one of its 2007 Jazz Masters Awards. The awards ceremony will take place in

New York on Jan. 12, during the annual conference of the International

Association for Jazz Education. The $25,000 fellowship is tantamount to a

Pulitzer for jazz; it is the most prestigious prize for jazz in this country.

In his earlier days as a writer and editor, Mr. Morgenstern wrote about

musicians like Louis Armstrong, Hot Lips Page, Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge,

and unlike many others in his field, grew close to them. "They were such fully

realized human beings, in spite of the problems in their lives," he said. "They

worked in nightclubs, they traveled, there was a lot of drinking; nobody took

great care of themselves. But they didn't let bad things destroy the inner core

of their humanity. Instead, they made this beautiful music."

The institute was founded in 1952 by Marshall Stearns, the jazz historian and

Hunter College literature professor who amassed a huge collection of records and

publications in his Greenwich Village apartment. Since 1976, when Mr.

Morgenstern was appointed its director, he has increased its staff to eight from

two, acquired important private collections, and moved it into a bigger, better

space in the John Cotton Dana Library at Rutgers's Newark campus.

The institute has the largest collection of jazz periodicals in the world;

thousands of books related to jazz; well over 100,000 recorded works of jazz; a

revelatory photograph file; films and music manuscripts; and a collection of

odds and ends, from Lester Young's tenor saxophone to a hive of Mary Lou

Williams's personal effects.

Everyone who writes anything serious about jazz these days eventually winds up

at the doors of the institute. In one of its back offices a few weeks ago, Mr.

Morgenstern gestured to piles of newly published books related to jazz, not yet

cataloged, and sighed. "In the 1940s, when I first became interested in jazz,"

he said, "all the books about it fit on a shelf about this big." He spread out

his hands about two feet wide, and he was not exaggerating. "Now there's an

enormous amount, almost too much. But we don't want to be exclusive, so we

include things that may be somewhat peripheral to jazz -- dance music, country

music, blues. You have to do that."

Unlike the other six Jazz Masters awards given in 2007 -- to musicians including

Jimmy Scott, Phil Woods and Toshiko Akiyoshi -- Mr. Morgenstern's is designated

for "jazz advocacy." Mr. Morgenstern, who lives in Jersey City, has written

hundreds of album liner notes and many critical columns; a book of these

writings, called "Living With Jazz," was published last year by Pantheon. And in

the 1960s and '70s, he was editor at Metronome, Downbeat and Jazz magazines. But

he does not consider himself a jazz critic.

His initial view of the American jazz press, when he was first exposed to them

in the late '40s, was dim. "There was all this critical warfare going on then

which really was very nasty, and not very intelligent," he said. It was when the

arrival of the new music, bebop, created a hard politics of fandom: you were

either for progress or against it.

Born in Germany, Mr. Morgenstern grew up in Vienna and Copenhagen. His father

was the Galician-born writer Soma Morgenstern, who later became known for his

novels written in German, including "The Third Pillar"; in the 1920s and 30s he

was a cultural reporter from Vienna for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Mr.

Morgenstern's father, a Jew, left his wife and son behind in Vienna in 1938,

ending up in a French concentration camp, from which he eventually escaped.

After routing through Morocco and Portugal, he finally landed in New York in

1941.

Mr. Morgenstern and his mother, who was Danish, escaped in 1943 to Copenhagen,

where they lived for several years before reuniting with Soma Morgenstern in New

York in 1947. Around this time, his interest in jazz started. His mother took

him to hear Fats Waller in Copenhagen; he also remembers the arrival, in 1945,

of a 78 r.p.m. record of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker's "Hot House" at a

Copenhagen record store. (It wasn't for sale, but regular customers could hear

it for a small fee.)

A few years later, in late 1947, he would be hearing Parker with Miles Davis at

the Three Deuces on 52nd Street in New York. "It was almost dreamlike," he

remembered. "There wasn't much that I could really latch on to, except when Bird

played a ballad, which was easily comprehensible." Across the street that week,

at Jimmy Ryan's, was Sidney Bechet, a hero of the previous generation. Mr.

Morgenstern heard him, too, and remembers a late set during which Bechet, seated

with his legs stretched out on a chair, played a single 45-minute blues. The

essence of Mr. Morgenstern -- and his gift to later generations of jazz writers

-- was his feeling that ecstasy was available on both sides of the street. "I

didn't become political about it," he said. "It seemed to me that you could

appreciate all kinds of music."