This gets to the heart of so much meanspirited commentary that the music could do without and why many of us who write about Jazz appreciatively loved Dan so much.
"Jazz Jerry: How did you begin your career as a critic?
Dan Morgenstern: When I first started hanging out with musicians and began getting into the music, if anyone suggested to me that I would one day become a critic, I probably would have sneered at them. At the time, I didn’t like most of what I was reading about the music. In the late forties, there was a lot of sniping back and forth between the traditionalists, the “moldy figs”, and the modernists who embraced bebop. There was always a lot of controversy, and it seemed to me and to many of the musicians that these opinions had nothing to do with what was really important, which was the music. Whether a person enjoyed the music of Sidney Bechet, Hot Lips Page, Pee Wee Russell and Wild Bill Davison, or that of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, it didn’t seem necessary to take sides. I didn’t care for all that came out of this, and I also felt that the record reviews were very supercilious and stupid. So, I didn’t like most jazz criticism, and I certainly didn’t think that I would become a jazz critic.
As I write in the book, I don’t like the word “critic” very much. I look at myself more as an advocate for the music than as a critic. When a person becomes a working journalist, he does the work of a reporter, an interviewer, and a reviewer, and talking about a journalist who writes about jazz as a “critic” always seems to be limiting."
I think the photo is by Mark Weber.
