Albert Hofmann, 102; Swiss chemist discovered LSD
His accidental experience of 'an extremely stimulated imagination' caused by the
drug led to a lifetime of experiments and initiated the psychedelic generation.
By Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
6:39 PM CDT, April 29, 2008
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD and thereby gave the
psychedelic generation the pharmaceutical vehicle to turn on, tune in and drop
out, has died. He was 102.
Hofmann died this morning at his home in Basel of a heart attack, according to
Rick Doblin, the head of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Assn. for Psychedelic
Studies.
Hofmann also identified and synthesized the active ingredients of peyote
mushrooms and a Mexican psychoactive plant called ololiuqui and developed at
least three related, non-psychoactive compounds that became widely used in
medicine.
Those other feats would have been little remembered, however, had he not
accidentally gotten a trace amount of an experimental compound called lysergic
acid diethylamide on his fingertips and taken the world's first acid trip.
Hofmann was a talented synthetic chemist working in the Basel research center of
Sandoz Laboratories -- now Novartis -- in the 1930s when he began studying the
chemistry of ergot, the common name for a fungus that grows on rye, barley and
certain other plants. Although ergot is poisonous, midwives had used a crude
extract for centuries to induce labor in pregnant women.
Twenty years earlier, researchers had isolated ergotamine, the first ergot
alkaloid isolated in pure form, and the compound had become widely used for
halting bleeding after childbirth and as a treatment for migraine headaches.
In the early 1930s, American researchers had identified the primary active
ingredient of ergot, a chemical called lysergic acid. Hofmann devised a
technique to make a series of derivatives of lysergic acid called amides and
began systematically looking for medically useful compounds.
The twenty-fifth compound he synthesized, in 1938, was lysergic acid
diethylamide (in German, lyserg-saure-diathylamid), or LSD-25. Because this
compound had a chemical structure similar to an existing drug called Coramine,
Hofmann had hoped that it would be a stimulant for the respiratory and
circulatory systems.
But testing in experimental animals showed no significant activity for the
drug -- although the animals were observed to become restless after its
administration -- and it was abandoned.
During this period, Hofmann synthesized at least three amides that became drugs:
Methergine, which is used to halt bleeding after birth; Hydergine, which
improves circulation in the limbs and cerebral function in the elderly; and
Dihydergot, which is used to stabilize circulation and blood pressure.
Prompted by what Hofmann later described as a "peculiar presentiment" that
LSD-25 might have properties other than those established in the first
investigations, he decided to look at it again.
On Friday afternoon, April 16, 1943, Hofmann had just completed synthesizing a
new batch when, he subsequently wrote his supervisor, "I was forced to interrupt
my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being
affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with slight dizziness.
"At home, I lay down and sank into a not-unpleasant intoxicated-like condition,
characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state I
perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes
with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours, this condition
faded away."
Hofmann suspected that the state had been caused by something in the lab. In an
interview on his 100th birthday, he said, "I didn't know what caused it, but I
knew that it was important."
After breathing the solvents he had used produced no effect, Hofmann suspected
that the synthetic drug was the source. "LSD spoke to me," he said. "He came to
me and said, 'You must find me.' He told me, 'Don't give me to the
pharmacologist, he won't find anything.' "
The following Monday, he took what he considered to be an extremely small dose
of LSD, so small that a similar dose of even the most powerful toxin known at
the time would have had little or no effect. He had planned to gradually
increase the dosage, but instead was surprised to encounter the first bad acid
trip.
Feeling bad, he asked his laboratory assistant to accompany him home on his
bicycle, no cars being available because of wartime restrictions. During the
trip, "I had the feeling that I could not move from the spot. I was cycling,
cycling, but the time seemed to stand still."
By the time they reached his home, its furnishings had transformed themselves
into terrifying objects.
"Everything in the room spun around, and the familiar objects and pieces of
furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forms," he wrote in his autobiography,
"LSD -- My Problem Child." "They were in constant motion, animated, as if driven
by an inner restlessness. The lady next door [became] a malevolent, insidious
witch with a colored mask."
Hofmann thought he was dying and sent for a doctor, but the physician could find
nothing wrong.
After about six hours, the experience began to change into a pleasant one.
"After some time, with my eyes closed, I began to enjoy this wonderful play of
colors and forms, which it really was a pleasure to observe. Then I went to
sleep and the next day I was fine. I felt quite fresh, like a newborn."
That day, April 19, has subsequently been celebrated by LSD proponents as
"Bicycle Day."
thomas.maugh@???
Copyright © 2008, The Los Angeles Times
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/news/dougie-hayward-tailor-who-dressed-stars-of-the-1960s-dies-aged-73-818054.html
Dougie Hayward, tailor who dressed stars of the 1960s, dies aged 73
By Jonathan Brown and Henry Deedes
Wednesday, 30 April 2008
It was the height of the 1960s and London had it all. The most glamorous
actors, the hippest pop stars, the most famous photographers - even the
coolest villains. Yet apart from sharing the most swinging city on Earth,
this new breed of classless celebrities had something else in common.
The reason the likes of Michael Caine, Terence Stamp and Tony Bennett looked
so good was in no small part down to one man: Dougie Hayward. It was a debt
of gratitude they were willing to honour with lifelong friendships. For
operating out of his shop in Mayfair's Mount Street, just off Savile Row,
Hayward presided for nearly four decades over one of the capital city's most
enduring sartorial institutions.
On Saturday night, in a London hospice close to the flat above the West End
shop where he continued to work and live until the ravages of illness became
too much, Hayward lost his long battle against neurological disease. He was
73.
A lifelong womaniser and bon vivant who provided the real-life inspiration
for his friend Caine's most iconic screen role - the serial philanderer
Alfie Elkins - not to mention the model for John Le Carre's Harry Pendel,
aka The Tailor of Panama - Hayward received the last rites from a Roman
Catholic priest before his death. According to his daughter and business
partner Polly, the lifelong agnostic was greatly soothed by the ceremony and
passed peacefully.
"Typical jammy bastard - gets forgiven all his sins right at the end," she
said yesterday. For Hayward's life was indeed charmed.
Born to a working-class family in pre-gentrified west London, Hayward's
father cleaned boilers for the BBC while his mother toiled in a bullet
factory. He never forget his background retaining a love for football and
beer that belied his veneer.
Hayward's was the archetypal 60s success story. He left school at 15,
apprenticed to a tailor who visited the flats in Cadogan Square where his
uncle was a caretaker. He later said he only took the job because he knew
his family would never be able to judge whether he was any good.
As fate would have it, he was very good indeed. But he struggled to get a job as
a cutter and even Oxford Street would not countenance him as a salesman
because, in their view, his Cockney accent precluded him from meeting
well-heeled customers.
It was a social division he was never to accept and in 1967 he opened his
Mount Street shop, which continues to trade.
"He was very, very funny," recalled his daughter yesterday. "He was not
scared of society and he refused to be penned in. Luckily for him he was in
the right place at the tight time. He just couldn't have happened before the
1960s," she said.
"He started out being very fashionable but he maintained it. He made friends
with people before they were famous. He made them look good and continued to
make them look good. He said to me once that you should never notice the
suit but you should notice the man - it should make you look younger and
thinner. It shouldn't be about fashion. He was amazing at doing that."
The friendships that Hayward made in the 1960s, like his clothes, endured.
Until recently lunched every Thursday with the photographer Terry O'Neill,
hair expert Philip Kingsley, the owner of Tramp Johnny Gold and, of course,
Michael Cane, who together formed the infamous Mayfair Orphans Club.
"We were great mates for 40 or 50 years. This is a big loss. He was greatly
loved - he loved women and they loved him. He loved good food and good music
and he had so many good friends and the most incredible client list. They
didn't go to him just for his brilliant tailoring but for his incredible
personality," O'Neill said yesterday.
His shop attracted the most photographed men of the day. Peter Sellers,
Terence Stamp, Rex Harrison and Sir John Gielgud became early visitors to
the famous sofa where they would put the world to rights over coffee,
complaining about the pressures of fame and, of course, their complex love
lives. Not that Hayward always relished such outpourings.
"I suppose women talk to their hairdresser and men talk to their tailor. If
you give them the chance all their worries will come flying out. But you
have got to stop it. You're not trying to be an analyst and also sometimes
they say too much," he said in one of his last interviews.
But it wasn't only men who were devotees of someone the actor James Coburn
once described as "the Rodin of Tweed". There was Sharon Tate, Bianca
Jagger, Faye Dunaway, Mia Farrow and Jean Shrimpton.
His friendship with the young Patrick Litchfield, the Queen's cousin, with
whom he founded the dining club Burkes, elevated him to the highest levels
of society and into the company of yet another famous woman. Before his
death, Litchfield recalled that Hayward was a regular visitor to Mustique,
where he would accompany Princess Margaret on faultless renditions of Cole
Porter songs.
His influence reached beyond the 1960s. He made a young Michael Parkinson
his first suit - the first of 48 - though the chat show host remembers him
as much more than a simple tailor.
"He ran the best salon in London. Anybody who's anybody was there. It soon
became apparent in the 1970s that everyone that was in town to do the show
would visit there. I met Alec Guinness there and Tony Bennett. He had this
great ability to treat everybody the same."
--------------------------
Jimmy Giuffre: Jazz clarinettist and composer
The Independent
Steve Voce
Tuesday, 29 April 2008
The casual listener would perhaps enjoy Jimmy Giuffre's
folksy, bluesy clarinet playing, but to jazz historians he
was perhaps more potent as a writer and arranger. His "Four
Brothers", written for the saxophone players in Woody
Herman's 1947 Second Herd, including Stan Getz and Zoot
Sims, became one of the everlasting jazz classics. He was
perhaps best known for the trio he led on clarinet that
played attractive and basic jazz like his famed "The Train
and the River", which, in one of the best bits of jazz
cinema ever, opened the film Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960),
a documentary record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.
One of the phrases that most irritated Humphrey Lyttelton
was "at the cutting edge of jazz", often used by one of the
more pompous newspapers. "I'm not aware that anyone ever
found out where that nebulous place may be," said Lyttelton.
If it ever existed, then Giuffre would have spent most of
his life sliding down its edge, for he was one of the most
constantly creative experimenters at work in the music.
On one occasion I talked to him in Liverpool when he was
about to travel to Germany to work with a symphony
orchestra. "I've written two bars for each instrument in the
orchestra," he told me, "and I'm going to hand each man a
sheet with his two bars on. Then I start them off, and each
of them can play his two bars whenever he wants to."
He was eating in the hotel dining room where the Rugby
League forward Dick Huddart and I had joined him. He ordered
coffee for Huddart and me, but the waiter haughtily insisted
that we should have a full meal. Giuffre explained that
Huddart and I had just eaten. "It would set a precedent if I
served your friends coffee," said the waiter. "Well, set
one," insisted Giuffre. The staff acquiesced with unusually
bad grace. When we were about to leave Giuffre called the
head waiter over and took a sixpence out of his pocket.
"Give this to the man that sets the precedents," Giuffre
told the head waiter.
Beginning on clarinet when he was nine, Giuffre began
playing the tenor sax whilst he was a student at North Texas
State Teachers College, where he gained a degree in music in
1942. Whilst at the college he worked in local dance bands
and played clarinet in classical ensembles. His fellow
students included Gene Roland, another great innovating jazz
composer of the future, the guitarist Herb Ellis and the
bassist Harry Babasin. Giuffre continued his studies with
the academic Dr Wesley LaViolette, himself a progressive,
who furthered Giuffre's interests in counterpoint, which
were to become a vital element in the young man's writing.
In 1947 he began composing for the progressive Boyd Raeburn
Orchestra, but joined the more commercial Jimmy Dorsey band
as a saxophone player. While based with Dorsey in Los
Angeles, he also worked in a revolutionary band led by Gene
Roland. This group had a four-piece tenor sax front line
that included Stan Getz and Zoot Sims. When Woody Herman
heard it he took on the entire front line, minus Giuffre, as
his saxophone section, and it was for these men that Giuffre
wrote "Four Brothers".
Working with Mexican and western bands to earn his living,
Giuffre also moved firmly into the Los Angeles jazz scene,
writing and playing to great effect with Shelly Manne,
Shorty Rogers and His Giants and the Lighthouse All-Stars.
This was the music that became known as "West Coast jazz".
An exquisite quintet with the trumpeter Shorty Rogers and
Giuffre playing mainly his sub-toned clarinet recorded
prolifically for the Atlantic label. He stayed with Shorty
and the Giants from 1953 to 1956.
The otherwise commercial Capitol record company had, in
1949, recorded the experimental Miles Davis Birth of the
Cool album and now, in 1954 and 1955, they also allowed
Giuffre to conduct his experiments on their record label,
recording more than 20 compositions with a band that
included the emerging trumpeter Jack Sheldon and other West
Coast musicians. The music for the 1955 album Tangents In
Jazz gained freedom by leaving out instruments that played
chords, like the piano and the guitar.
In 1956 Giuffre began recording under his own name for
Atlantic, and again a remarkable string of experiments on
record resulted, with the clarinet sometimes accompanied by
oboe, cor anglais and bassoon among the more conventional
jazz instruments.
Giuffre left Shorty Rogers to form his first trio with the
guitarist Jim Hall and a bassist. He fronted the group
playing clarinet, tenor and baritone saxes. When the valve
trombonist Bob Brookmeyer became available to him, he
dropped the bass, added Brookmeyer instead and had Jim Hall
play the bass notes on his guitar. This was the trio that
elaborated basic blues and achieved a folksy sound. Giuffre
confined his clarinet work to the lower and middle register,
rarely playing high notes. The trio gained a huge following
and its records for Atlantic sold well.
Beginning at the prestigious Lenox School of Jazz in the
summer of 1957, Giuffre began a parallel career as a music
teacher. When told that Giuffre would be teaching clarinet
there, the French critic André Hodeir asked "Who will be
teaching the upper register?"
But Giuffre relinquished the folksy image for his later
trios, and many in his audience were surprised to find a
contradicting cooler sound, lower on emotion, and very much
influenced by the European composers, including Claude
Debussy. He encountered the ultimate free player Ornette
Coleman at Lenox and Coleman too had a profound effect on
Giuffre's music.
In 1960 Giuffre abandoned his baritone saxophone and for the
next five years concentrated on the clarinet. The trio was
by now made up with Paul Bley on piano and Steve Swallow on
bass and it became one of the building blocks of the new
"free jazz" movement. The trio made a classic album of the
genre, Free Fall, in 1962. By now more acclaimed in Europe
than he was at home, the trio toured abroad frequently. Its
music became more and more impenetrable to the listening
public and, after a life of two years, when the trio broke
up on its last job in New York the musicians earned 35 cents
each. But the albums that the three recorded received star
ratings when they were re-issued in the 1990s.
Brookmeyer came back to make up Giuffre's quintet in 1968.
"I wanted to play music. I wanted to be where I had been
happiest in the past," said Brookmeyer, "and that sort of
thinking led me back to Jimmy Giuffre."
Moving back to the East Coast in 1970 Giuffre taught at
Rutgers University, New York, and the New England
Conservatory. He also composed music for ballet and theatre
companies and wrote for TV commercials. Because he had
beautiful hands he was called on as a hand model in some
commercials.
In 1978 Giuffre joined the faculty of the New England
Conservatory of Music in Boston, teaching there until the
early 1990s. During the 1980s he formed another trio which
based its music on sounds from Asia and Africa. The 1961
trio with Bley and Swallow reunited occasionally during the
1990s and made new albums. In all Giuffre recorded more than
30 albums as a leader.
Steve Voce
James Peter Giuffre, clarinettist, saxophonist, composer and
bandleader: born Dallas, Texas 26 April 1921; married; died
Pittsfield, Massachusetts 24 April 2008.
Jimmy Giuffre
Discreet, fascinating exponent of varied styles of jazz on
saxophone and clarinet
John Fordham
Wednesday April 30, 2008
Guardian
The Jazz Cafe in London's Camden Town hardly seemed the
ideal setting for Jimmy Giuffre's intimate kind of jazz - on
that night in 1991, a wispy sorcery on clarinet and soprano
saxophone like bubbles drifting in still air. But Giuffre
and his chamber jazz trio (with longtime partners Paul Bley
on piano and Steve Swallow on bass guitar) brought a
normally animated venue to an awed silence as the then
70-year-old Giuffre, looking like a thin owl, eased gently
between a pastel-hued impressionism, hints of the blues,
brief glimpses of a New Orleans-like raucousness, and soft
doodling with double-time bebop lines.
Giuffre, who has died aged 86 of complications from
Parkinson's disease, had been making music this way for
decades - long before the post-1960s north European movement
that brought ambient sounds and spaciness into the language
of jazz. If he had been active longer as a player, he would
very likely have joined the prestigious ECM label's roster
of quietly contemplative jazz makers - the groundwork even
existed, ECM having released its first reissue, in the early
1990s, of the landmark Giuffre/Bley/Swallow free-jazz
session simply titled 1961.
Giuffre's later years, however, were spent in comparative
obscurity. Yet he had been a jazz celebrity from his late
1940s membership of Woody Herman's Second Herd (along with
Stan Getz, among others), through his iconic performance of
the contrapuntal The Train and the River in the 1958 Newport
festival film Jazz on a Summer's Day. His mature style
seemed to have several distinct timbral identities on his
broad range of instruments: dark, loose-pitched and
occasionally even raw in a Charles Lloyd-like manner on
tenor sax; poignant and pure-toned on soprano; airy and
diaphanous on flute; folksy, low-pitched and rather
European-sounding on clarinet.
Giuffre was born in Dallas, Texas, and took up the clarinet
at nine. He studied music at North Texas State Teachers
College, worked in dance bands and classical ensembles, and
spent four years in an air force orchestra. He studied
composition in California in the late 1940s, and soon began
arranging for the innovative, Bartok-and-Debussy influenced
dance band of Boyd Raeburn, and the swing orchestra of Jimmy
Dorsey.
His composition teacher was the poet and composer Dr Wesley
La Violette, whose understanding of counterpoint helped him
envisage a more melodically intertwined manner of
improvising than the vertical, scales-over-chords approach
of bebop. Giuffre made his first lasting contribution to
jazz in 1947, when he arranged and composed the hit theme
Four Brothers, to showcase the star sax team of Getz, Zoot
Sims, Herbie Steward and Serge Chaloff in Herman's Second
Herd. A miniature masterpiece of section-writing and spurs
to individual flights, Four Brothers showed how
distinctively he was already negotiating the tricky jazz
compromise of freedom and organisation. Giuffre began his
own recording career in the same year, joined drummer Buddy
Rich's band as tenor saxist and musical director, and in
1948 replaced Sims in Herman's band.
Playing tenor and baritone saxes and clarinet, Giuffre
worked on the west coast with Shelly Manne, Howard Rumsey's
Lighthouse Allstars and Shorty Rogers' Giants. On the 1955
Capitol album Tangents in Jazz, he confirmed the
counterpoint fascination by eschewing chord-playing
instruments; he also made The Jimmy Giuffre Clarinet album
in 1956 with various key West Coast figures including Manne,
Rogers and pianist Jimmy Rowles, and recorded a version of
the Broadway hit The Music Man for Atlantic. He taught at
the influential Lenox School of Jazz in 1957, significantly
meeting the revolutionary-in-the-making Ornette Coleman
there.
Already calling his work "folk-jazz," Giuffre was producing
a subtle yet homely kind of music that seemed far removed
from the big-city sidewalks. He formed the first of his
trios - at first with guitarist Jim Hall and bassist Ralph
Pena, then with valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer replacing
Pena. When Brookmeyer left, Giuffre concentrated on
clarinet, and formed a new trio with Bley and Swallow. The
albums Fusion, Thesis and Free Fall were made for Verve and
Columbia, the group adopting something of the intuitive,
one-touch responsiveness of the Coleman band - but it was a
commercial disaster.
Giuffre played a more conventionally bluesy music later in
the 1960s, and a Middle Eastern, African and
oriental-influenced repertoire in the 70s. He collaborated
on projects with choreographer Jean Erdman, wrote music for
Mobil Oil commercials, and, in the 80s, investigated several
styles, from world-music to postbop. Giuffre recorded three
albums for the Soul Note label with an electric quartet,
worked in a woodwind duo with bass clarinetist André Jaume
(notably on the delicately detailed 1987 album Eiffel) and
taught extensively - at Rutgers University, and at the New
England Conservatory for Music, until he gave up teaching in
the 1990s.
In his last performing years, his reputation as an
overlooked free-improviser grew. His wife Juanita, who
survives him, began contributing remarkable compositions
(like When Things Go Wrong on the 1991 River Station album),
and the trio with Bley and Swallow produced a delectable
swansong of new pieces, on Fly Away Little Bird in 1992.
Giuffre could sound almost artlessly simple at times, but
this represented a paring down of jazzmaking to its
essentials. He was the most reticent of jazz radicals, but
his modesty disguised a visionary innovator.
· James Peter Giuffre, jazz musician, arranger and composer,
born April 26 1921; died April 24 2008
