Although Art D’Lugoff’s club, the Village Gate, lived in the shadow of its more famous rival, the Village Vanguard, it made a distinctive contribution to New York’s nightlife.
In the course of more than three decades the venue played host to an unusually eclectic roster, from the aristocracy of jazz, blues and folk to musical revues and an array of comedians including Woody Allen, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby.
D’Lugoff was happy to admit that one of his rare slips was his decision to turn down the chance to book an aspiring young folk singer called Bob Dylan. “I didn’t think doing that close an imitation of Woody Guthrie was going to get him anywhere,” he recalled many years later.
Born in 1924 and brought up in Brooklyn, Arthur Joshua Dlugoff (he changed the spelling of his name to make it easier to pronounce) served with the US Air Force in China during the Second World War, and then earned a degree from New York University before embarking on a string of jobs including tree surgeon’s assistant and encyclopaedia salesman.
He later turned to promoting concerts, presenting jazz artists such as Billie Holiday as well as performers from across the popular music spectrum. He opened the Village Gate in 1958 in a building on the corner of Bleecker and Thompson Streets which is said to have once housed the largest flophouse in the city, with cubicles for more than 1,000 down-and-outs.
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The club occupied the basement although D’Lugoff later expandedto the upper floors and terrace. As he explained to Woody Allen’s biographer, Eric Lax, the venture was launched at a moment when Greenwich Village was starting to attract a new, young bohemian clientele. “Where I settled was a rather reasonable place because no one else wanted to go there and I got a decent price for a big space. Midtown had nothing like it. The area was ripe for something to happen culturally,” he said.
“Where else in Manhattan could you get space to put on a show and have a place for people to sit and drink coffee all afternoon for 50 cents, which was considered highway robbery.” Before he achieved fame, the actor Dustin Hoffman waited on tables at the club. The playwright Sam Shepard was a bus boy.
One of D’Lugoff’s trademarks was his habit of booking highly contrasting double bills, most of them successful, some less so (as when the restless saxophonist John Coltrane shared the billing with the comparatively mellow folk singer Odetta).
In later years D’Lugoff described his most memorable night as the occasion in 1962 when the saxophonist Stan Getz and the guitarist Charlie Byrd — who had just released their ground-breaking bossa nova album, Jazz Samba — made a joint appearance with the Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete.
Other jazz luminaries to appear on the bandstand over the years included the mercurial Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Erroll Garner and Thelonious Monk. Thanks to its owner’s catholic tastes, the club hosted a much admired and long-running series of duels known as “Salsa Meets Jazz”, an opportunity for such musicians as Tito Puente, Herbie Mann and Dexter Gordon to seek out common ground. D’Lugoff also drafted in the young Tom Lehrer, reportedly after hearing him play in Washington Square Park.
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His hankering after the unconventional sometimes produced drama, as on the night in 1965 when the venue hosted a highly charged debate with the daunting title of Art, Politics, Race, and the Apotheosis of Hate. A droll account of proceedings later appeared in The Village Voice: “The high points of the unSocratic dialogue included: LeRoi Jones proposing Mao Tse-Tung for Mayor of New York; the Jewish D’Lugoff calling the Jewish \[jazz critic Nat\] Hentoff ‘anti-Semitic’; a Negro from the audience calling Reverend Martin Luther King a ‘jackass’. . . LeRoi Jones calling a white woman in the audience a ‘rotten fruit’; and \[the avant-garde pianist\] Cecil Taylor repeatedly asking D’Lugoff for a job.”
D’Lugoff’s more conventional coups also included the long-running chanson revue Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris as well as Vernel Bagneris’s irrepressible One Mo’ Time, a celebration of vintage black vaudeville that included a sterling appearance by the venerable trumpeter Jabbo Smith.
If Bagneris’s show was high-spirited, another of the club’s hits, Macbird, took a satirical view of the Vietnam War. Let My People Come, which enjoyed success in the 1970s, courted controversy with its provocative sexual themes. National Lampoon Lemmings, a Woodstock satire, featured a youthful John Belushi and Chevy Chase.
The Village Gate finally closed its doors in 1994, D’Lugoff admitting defeat in the face of mounting rent and debts and a decline in the number of Manhattan’s traditional nighthawks. He remained active as an off-Broadway producer, however, and also devoted his energies to campaigning for a national jazz museum.
A new version of the Gate briefly surfaced in midtown in the mid-1990s. Last year D’Lugoff finally returned to his old haunt in the Village, serving as consultant to Le Poisson Rouge, the restaurant-club which had opened in the Gate’s former premises.
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D’Lugoff is survived by his wife, Avital Achai, a son and three daughters.
Art D’Lugoff, impresario and nightclub owner, was born on August 2, 1924. He died on November 4, 2009, aged 85