[Dixielandjazz] Art D'Lugoff Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

Art D'Lugoff owned the Village Gate, one of the most eclectic  
nightclubs  in the Greenwich Village section of New York City back in  
the good old days.

Among other offerings, there was lots of Jazz there. Including a short  
run by The Southampton Dixie, Racing and Clambake Society Jazz Band of  
which I was a member. We appeared opposite a quartet fronted by bop  
saxophonist Jackie McLean.

Wonderful nightclub run by an interesting man. RIP, Art.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


November 6, 2009 - NY TIMES - by Margalit Fox
Art D’Lugoff, Village Gate Impresario, Dies at 85

Art D’Lugoff, who was widely regarded as the dean of New York  
nightclub impresarios and whose storied spot, the Village Gate, was  
for more than 30 years home to performers as celebrated, and diverse,  
as Duke Ellington, Allen Ginsberg and John Belushi, died on Wednesday  
in Manhattan. He was 85 and lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

The cause has not been determined, said Mr. D’Lugoff’s brother, Burt,  
a medical doctor and frequent silent partner in his joyously noisy  
endeavors. Mr. D’Lugoff died at the Allen Hospital of New York- 
Presbyterian Hospital, where he had been taken on Wednesday after  
experiencing shortness of breath.

Opened in 1958, the Village Gate was on the corner of Bleecker and  
Thompson Streets. The cavernous basement space it occupied — the  
building’s upper floors were then a flophouse — had once been a laundry.

Mr. D’Lugoff later expanded to the upper floors, and in its heyday the  
Gate comprised the basement space, used primarily for live music of  
all kinds; a street-level terrace for jazz; and the Top of the Gate,  
an upper-story performance space.

The club closed its doors in 1994, amid rising rents, a changing  
market for live music and the aftermath of some unsuccessful  
investments by Mr. D’Lugoff. It briefly reappeared on West 52nd Street  
in 1996 but sputtered out after less than a year.

Mr. D’Lugoff was also a producer of Off Broadway shows — most at the  
Gate — and helped conceive the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.

The Gate may have lacked the cachet of the Village Vanguard, a more  
intimate West Village club, but it was a bright star in the city’s  
cultural firmament for decades. A young Woody Allen did stand-up  
comedy there. The playwright-to-be Sam Shepard bused tables there. A  
waiter named Dustin Hoffman was fired there for being so engrossed in  
the performances that he neglected his customers, though service was  
by all accounts never the club’s strength. Dozens of albums were  
recorded there, by musicians like Pete Seeger and Nina Simone and by  
comics like Dick Gregory.

Though most often thought of as a jazz space — among the eminences  
heard there over the years were John Coltrane, Miles Davis and  
Thelonious Monk — the Gate offered nearly every type of performance  
imaginable. There were blues artists like B. B. King; soul singers  
like Aretha Franklin; rockers like Jimi Hendrix; comics like Mort Sahl  
and Richard Pryor; and Beat poets. There was the harmonica virtuoso  
Larry Adler; the odd classical recital (the composer Edgard Varèse  
gave the American premiere of his “Poème Électronique” there); and a  
duck, Hermione, who performed in the musical “Scrambled Feet,” which  
opened there in 1979.

Over the years the club also earned a reputation as an important Off  
Broadway theater space, presenting shows like “MacBird!” (1967), the  
Vietnam-era political satire; the revue “Jacques Brel Is Alive and  
Well and Living in Paris,” which had its premiere there in 1968; and  
“One Mo’ Time,” the musical about black vaudeville that opened in 1979.

For many patrons, as for Mr. D’Lugoff himself, the Gate’s eclecticism  
was at the heart of its charm. One of his most celebrated offerings  
was Salsa Meets Jazz, a regular series in the 1970s that paired great  
Latin artists like Machito and Tito Puente with jazz titans like  
Dexter Gordon and Dizzy Gillespie.

But sometimes the fare grew too varied even for Mr. D’Lugoff, as he  
told The New York Times in 1988. “I used to put together a lot of  
unlikely combinations to appeal to a bigger audience,” he said. “Once  
we had Nina Simone, Dick Gregory and Larry Adler all on the same bill  
and had so much trouble deciding who would open that I went across the  
street and hired a guitarist.”

Arthur Joshua Dlugoff was born in Harlem on Aug. 2, 1924, the son of  
Raphael Dlugoff, who ran a vacuum-cleaner and sewing-machine repair  
shop, and the former Rachel Mandelbaum. (Art later added an apostrophe  
to his surname as a pronunciation aid.)

Reared in Brooklyn, Mr. D’Lugoff served with the Army Air Forces in  
China in World War II. He later earned a bachelor’s in literature and  
economics from New York University and attended law school there for  
one year.

For the next few years Mr. D’Lugoff enjoyed a career as eclectic as  
any of his concert bills, working as an encyclopedia salesman, a  
waiter in borscht belt hotels, a cab driver in Los Angeles, a tree  
surgeon’s assistant in upstate New York and a union organizer in  
Massachusetts and Kentucky. Returning to New York, he embarked on a  
career as a concert promoter, presenting calypso, folk and jazz  
artists around the city.

He soon wanted his own space, and the Village Gate was born. (The name  
stemmed from the fact that early on, patrons entered through a metal  
gate on Thompson Street to avoid the flophouse traffic on Bleecker.)

Besides his brother, Burt, of Baltimore, Mr. D’Lugoff is survived by  
his wife, the former Avital Achai; a son, Raphael; three daughters,  
Sharon D’Lugoff Blythe, Dahlia D’Lugoff and Rashi D’Lugoff; and five  
grandchildren.

One secret of the Gate’s success was Mr. D’Lugoff’s eye for what the  
public wished to see. This was perhaps nowhere more evident than in  
“Let My People Come,” which opened there in 1974. Subtitled “A Sexual  
Musical,” it was all singing, all dancing and almost all naked, male  
and female, from top to toe.

The State Liquor Authority would have none of this. Where spirit was  
on offer, it decreed, the flesh should not be. In a protracted battle  
that engendered much coverage in the news media, it lifted the Gate’s  
liquor license.Mr. D’Lugoff went to court, the license was reinstated  
and the show ran for two and a half years.