Henry Jacobs

Henry Sandy Jacobs (born October 9, 1924 in Chicago , United States ; † September 25, 2015 in the USA) was an interdisciplinary American sound artist , radio presenter , film producer and entertainer .

Live and act

Training and first experiments

Jacobs gained his first showbiz experience while serving with the United States Army Air Corps and then studied at the University of Chicago until he graduated . With the beginning of the 1950s he found employment in Mexico City with local radio and television stations. In 1952 Jacobs returned to his hometown of Chicago and began to experiment with tape noise. He was particularly interested in the structural diversity of seemingly spontaneous noises in public spaces. While studying at the University of Illinois , he also produced a regular entertainment program on campus radio station entitled "Music and Folklore". Some of his presentations had a fun and happening character, for example when Jacobs asked supposed experts to provide background information for certain pieces of ethnic music. If no real experts were available, he often invented them, as was the case with an alleged Hebrew musicologist named "Sholem Stein", who claimed, for example, that calypso music had rabbinical roots.

With radio and film

Even in the years after 1953, when Jacobs was now broadcasting from San Francisco, he experimented with sound recordings and loudspeakers and created, for example, a "Sonata for Loudspeakers", which he first appeared in his radio program Radio Program No. 1 demonstrated. In addition, Jacobs continued to deal with all aspects of sound, the composition of Musique Concrete and improvisational theater as well as new approaches in the humor sector. Encounters with Lawrence Ferlinghetti , Kenneth Rexroth , Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce broadened his intellectual horizons. Henry Jacobs was particularly impressed by encounters with Ken Nordine , who was called "the father of word jazz", and with Alan Watts , a former priest of the Anglican Church. Jacobs 'collaboration with artist Jordan Belson resulted in the 1957 Vortex Concerts, a series of concerts of new music, including some of Jacobs' own music, and that of Karlheinz Stockhausen , presented in the Morrison Planetarium in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco were. Jacobs' album "The Wide Weird World by Shorty Petterstein" consisted mainly of encounters between hipster sound and square slang that could not be exactly assigned to anyone. The character of Shorty Petterstein also played a role in the cartoon The Interview (1961) by Ernest Pintoff . Also in 1961 there was a collaboration between Jacobs and the filmmaker Jordan Belson on an eight-minute 16mm film called Allures . In 1963 Jacobs released an album called "The Laughing String".

Oscar nomination and television work

With the support of the American Cancer Society, Jacobs and John Korty created an animated short film about attempts to quit smoking. This break with a habit that has become dear to me was called Breaking the Habit in the original English and was nominated for an Oscar in the category Best Short Film in 1965. As a result, Jacobs received more media attention than ever before and was now also of interest to the commercial establishment. In the late 1960s he created radio advertising for Japan Airlines and delivered audio and video concepts for the marketing department of Bank of America . Jacob's preoccupation with sound manipulation also interested the very young George Lucas , and Jacobs was asked to provide improvised soundtrack material and background dialogue for the first Lucas film, THX 1138 .

In 1972, Jacobs worked with Bob McClay and Chris Koch on a series of half-hour television programs for the San Francisco Public Television (KQED). The program "The Fine Art of Goofing Off" was considered a kind of philosophical Sesame Street . Each program had an open theme, such as "time" or "work", and was designed like a collage. Here, too, Henry Jacobs worked in an interdisciplinary manner and collaborated with artists as diverse as Alan Watts, Victor Moscoso, Mark Unobsky, Pete Sears, Woody Leafer and Jordan Belson. Together with David Grieve, Jacobs created the 1973 film Essential Alan Watts: Man in Nature, Work as Play , in which Watts' connections to the Beat Generation were described. Eventually he retired to north San Francisco and rarely appeared in public.

Web links

• Henry Jacobs on last.fm/music
• Henry Jacobs in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Henry Jacobs at Discogs (English)