Dan Morgenstern

Living With Jazz: A Reader

After spending more than five decades in the jazz field as historian and writer, Dan Morgenstern had no problem filling the 736 pages of Living with Jazz: A Reader, with profiles on jazz legends, liner notes, reviews of records, biographies and concerts, interviews, and reflections on the outreach of jazz into movies, television and dance. All were written by Morgenstern over a career spanning more than four decades, including seven years as editor of Down Beat magazine, stints as jazz reviewer for several newspapers, editor of the Institute's Annual Review of Jazz Studies and monography series Studies in Jazz, author of hundreds of articles, and co-author of, or contributor to, numerous jazz books.

It is Morgenstern's blending of factual and personal materials that set it apart from strictly research-based books. Publisher's Weekly lauded the book as a "stimulating guide to jazz in the second half of the 20th century" and called it a "monumental volume."

Living with Jazz was honored with the prestigious Deems Taylor Award "for outstanding print, broadcast and new media coverage of music" from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

The New York Times book review, Dec 2004