Dan Morgenstern and Teaching the Early History of Jazz

While Dan Morgenstern is best known as the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies (Rutgers University), he is equally important as one of the few writers on jazz to have retained a comprehensive overview of jazz history. Several generations of jazz teachers have only been interested in jazz from bebop onwards and as a consequence few teachers or students of jazz have a real grasp on the scope and sounds of early jazz. The challenge is to make the study of jazz history meaningful and to provide our students with a sufficiently wide contextual base to understand the full history of jazz.