NEW YORK, NY.- Dan Morgenstern, a revered jazz journalist, teacher and historian and one of the last jazz scholars to have known the giants of jazz he wrote about as both a friend and a chronicler, died Saturday in Manhattan. He was 94.

His son Josh said his death, in a hospital, was caused by heart failure.

Morgenstern was a jazz writer uniquely embraced by jazz musicians — a nonmusician who captured their sounds in unpretentious prose, amplified with sweeping and encyclopedic historical context.

He was known for his low-key manner and humility, but his accomplishments as a jazz scholar were larger than life.

He contributed thousands of articles to magazines, newspapers and journals, and he served the venerable Metronome magazine as its last editor-in-chief and Jazz magazine (later Jazz & Pop) as its first. He reviewed live jazz for The New York Post and records for The Chicago Sun-Times, as well as publishing 148 record reviews while an editor at DownBeat, including a stint from 1967 to 1973 as the magazine’s chief editor.

His incisive liner-note essays won eight Grammy Awards. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2007 and received three Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in music writing from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, two of them for his books “Jazz People” (1976) and “Living With Jazz” (2004). He was involved — as a writer, adviser, music consultant and occasional onscreen authority — in more than a dozen jazz documentaries. Most decisively, he served from 1976 to 2011 as the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, elevating the institute into the largest repository of jazz documents, recordings and memorabilia in the world.

“I don’t like the word ‘critic’ very much,” Morgenstern often maintained. “I look at myself more as an advocate for the music than as a critic,” he wrote in “Living With Jazz.” “My most enthusiastic early readers were my musician friends, and one thing led to another. What has served me best, I hope, is that I learned about the music not from books but from the people who created it.”

The German-born Morgenstern’s Holocaust-era flight to the jazz clubs of New York City was as extraordinary as any jazz journey he later wrote about. “Most people, when they come to New York for the first time, they want to see the Statue of Liberty or Empire State Building,” Morgenstern said in filmmaker Ken Burns’ multipart PBS documentary “Jazz.” “I wanted to see 52nd Street.”

That fabled street of jazz clubs “was just a row of brownstones, basically,” he recalled in a 2005 interview with jerryjazzmusician.com. “The first time I saw it, it was actually shorter than I expected it to be. The clubs were smaller and a little funkier than I imagined, but, as I found out, that was part of their charm.”

“One night in 1949 or so,” he added, “a friend of mine and our dates wound up closing Jimmy Ryan’s; the clubs were all open until 3 or 4 in the morning then.” The great New Orleans clarinetist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet was leading a quartet that night, he recalled, “and at one point Sidney sat down, pulled up a chair and put his feet up so he could stretch his legs. He closed his eyes and played a slow blues for about 15 minutes. It was so marvelous.”

Dan Michael Morgenstern was born in Munich on Oct. 24, 1929, to Soma Morgenstern, a prolific novelist, journalist and playwright, and Ingeborg (von Klenau) Morgenstern, the daughter of Danish composer and conductor Paul von Klenau. He grew up in Vienna, where his father, the son of Hasidic Jews from what is today Ukraine, had settled after serving in World War I.

In the wake of the Anschluss, Morgenstern’s father escaped on one of the last trains out of Austria, making his way to France while Morgenstern and his mother fled to Denmark. When the Nazis reached Copenhagen, mother and son were smuggled out of Denmark by the Danish resistance, landing in Sweden in mid-October 1943. They remained there until the war ended, then returned to Copenhagen, where, Morgenstern later remembered, “I really began to get into jazz.”

Morgenstern’s father had moved on from France to New York City, where, in April 1947, the family was at last reunited. It had been eight years since Morgenstern, now 17 years old, had seen his father. “It must have been pretty strange for him, to be presented with this person,” Morgenstern later reflected, “groping around whether we should speak English or German.”

With his father’s help, Morgenstern got a job as a trainee in the mail room at Time-Life and then spent a stint as a copy boy at The New York Times, before being drafted in February 1951 and, improbably, returning to Munich for his tour of duty. After being discharged, Morgenstern entered Brandeis University on the GI Bill; joined the student newspaper, The Justice (which he would ultimately edit); and discovered the enormously active Boston jazz scene, in which he immersed himself.

With a few other student jazz fans, Morgenstern decided to bring jazz to Brandeis. In 1954 they approached George Wein, who owned Boston’s top jazz club, Storyville, and was about to begin his long tenure as the producer of the Newport Jazz Festival. Wein offered the students Stan Getz, who was slated to headline at Storyville. A deal was struck, and Morgenstern wrote an article about Getz coming to Brandeis for The Justice. It was his first published piece.

“I had a long-standing hatred of most of what I read in the jazz press,” Morgenstern later confessed in an interview for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program. “I remember, while I was in Germany, I would read DownBeat; I wanted to see what was coming out, but most of the time I really got frustrated. The writing could be so mean-spirited.”

Morgenstern found a job at The New York Post after graduation, again as a copy boy, and was quickly promoted to editorial assistant in the drama department, which also covered film and music. One of his first bylined pieces was a review of the Randall’s Island Jazz Festival in 1959. He also resumed his nightly patronage of every conceivable jazz club and hangout on the island of Manhattan, with occasional stops in the Bronx and Brooklyn. As a result, he began to befriend musicians, among them tenor saxophone titan Coleman Hawkins.

“Coleman did a very big thing for me in terms of establishing me in the musicians’ circle,” Morgenstern recalled in the Smithsonian interview. “Coleman was known for never buying anybody a drink. It’s not that he was cheap. He once explained it to me — he said: ‘You buy somebody a drink. Then they buy you one. You wind up drinking more than you really want.’

“Coleman had this big, booming voice. Even in a noisy bar you could hear him over the crowd; his voice really carried. One night he called out to me in the Copper Rail, one of the midtown musician watering holes: ‘Danny! What are you drinking?’ Everybody turned around and looked. That was like my initiation.”

Morgenstern became one of the preeminent eyewitnesses to jazz history in the second half of the 20th century, invited to jam sessions, recording sessions and late-night gatherings to which few “civilians” were given entree. He had a simple theory as to why.

“I was able to befriend quite a lot of musicians who initially were a little suspicious of me,” he observed. “This was during a period when there was an unspoken thing that existed which had to do with acceptance of white people by African Americans. They had to check you out a little bit. But when they found out I was not American-born, my European background could act as an opening.”

Morgenstern married Elsa Schochet in 1974; a brief earlier marriage had ended in divorce. They had two sons, Adam Oran (named for trumpeter Oran “Hot Lips” Page) and Joshua Louis (named for Louis Armstrong). All three survive him.

Though he retired as director of the Institute of Jazz Studies in 2011, Morgenstern never stopped writing about, listening to or learning about jazz.

“I’ve had a long life, and I’ve been able to make a living and a life out of involvement with something that I really loved, and still do,” he told the Smithsonian. “The moment that I would think that I would get bored with listening to this great music, I would quit. But I still get a kick out of it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.