Posted on Mon, Nov. 9, 2009
Art D'Lugoff, 85, whose famed New York nightclub, the Village Gate, featured performers from jazz great Duke Ellington to 1960s counterculture rocker Jimi Hendrix, died Wednesday at a Manhattan hospital.
Mr. D'Lugoff hired blacklisted singers Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger and fired Dustin Hoffman as a waiter. Hoffman, then a struggling actor, later said he was so distracted by the performers that he neglected customers. Mr. D'Lugoff booked jazz greats John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk and standup comics Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen. Hendrix and Jim Morrison performed at a 1970 benefit the club hosted for counterculture icon Timothy Leary, a proponent of LSD experimentation.
Music lovers flocked to the Village Gate from 1958, when Mr. D'Lugoff opened the Greenwich Village club, until it closed in 1994. - AP
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