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Dan Morgenstern - Fats Waller & His Rhythm - If You Got to Ask, You Ain't Got It! (2006)

Fats Waller & His Rhythm CD cover
Fats Waller & His Rhythm

Dan Morgenstern Grammy Award for Best Album Notes 2006

Fats Waller & His Rhythm -If You Got to Ask, You Ain't Got It!
(2006) Bluebird/Legacy

Read Dan's Grammy winning essay, included with the boxed CD set:
Fats Waller & His Rhythm: CD Collection Notes - Complete Transcription

(text searchable transcript created and provided for research and education under a National Endowment for the Arts -Art Works grant # 1807859-31 “Reminiscences of NEA Jazz Master Dan Morgenstern”)

Dan's abilities to be a professional musician, wonderful storyteller, precise historian with a wealth of detail, and personal recollections make this a wonderful study in professional journalism. What used to be album liner notes, which then became album notes, now becomes a full fledged essay. 

As Ted Panken relates, "Dan's work, with his marvelously detailed, and ebullient, and loving notes. You are reading someone who is an extreme fan, and someone who has a very strongly typed aesthetic. And someone who really gets into the granular aspect of listening to music on these..."