Dan Morgenstern, longtime director of the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies on the Newark campus, has won his seventh Grammy award, for Best Album Notes, for “If You Got to Ask, You Ain't Got It!" (Fats Waller).
The Grammy, announced at the February 11 awards ceremony in Los Angeles, was the latest in a series of honors bestowed upon Morgenstern in recognition of his lifetime of contributions to jazz. Last month Morgenstern, a jazz historian, writer, and educator, stood alongside other jazz luminaries on a stage in New York – the only nonmusician in the group – as he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, receiving the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy. The award included a one-time fellowship of $25,000. The New York Times calls the “Jazz Master” designation “the nation’s highest jazz honor.”
In January 2006 he was awarded the Deems Taylor Award “for outstanding print, broadcast and new media coverage of music” from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) for his book, Living With Jazz (Pantheon Books, November 2004), which chronicles more than five decades of his jazz writings. He also received the Deems Taylor Award in 1977 for his book, Jazz People.
Morgenstern’s extensive knowledge of jazz led famed documentarian Ken Burns to ask Morgenstern to act as senior adviser to his 10-part PBS series, “Jazz."
Morgenstern co-produces and co-hosts the institute’s “Jazz from the Archives” on WBGO-FM’ co-hosts the monthly Jazz Research Roundtable’ and also has earned six Grammy awards, for best album notes.
Morgenstern’s career includes seven years as editor of the leading jazz publication DownBeat, stints as jazz reviewer for the New York Post, record reviewer for the Chicago Sun Times, and editor of the Annual Review of Jazz Studies and the monograph series Studies in Jazz. He has written hundreds of articles and co-authored or contributed to numerous jazz books.
The Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, the world’s most extensive jazz archives, is part of the Rutgers University Libraries. The IJS is housed in the John Cotton Dana Library on the Newark Campus.