Henry Jacobs

Henry Sandy Jacobs (October 9, 1924 – September 25, 2015) was an American sound artist and humorist.

Jacobs was born in Chicago, Illinois. After a tour in the Air Corps —during which time he acquired some broadcast experience—, and graduation from the University of Chicago, he moved to Mexico City. There, around 1950, he appeared on Mexican radio station XEW and fledgling television station XHTV.

In 1952, Jacobs returned to Chicago and began experimenting with reel to reel tape recorders, taking particular advantage of the ease with which they made it possible to manipulate sound directly. Ambient, everyday sound, and especially the structural variety of apparently spontaneous sounds, interested him; at one point he ventured to Haiti to make street recordings. While attending graduate courses at the University of Illinois, he also produced a regular program on the campus radio station (WILL) entitled Music and Folklore, which is believed by some to be one of the first presentations of "world music" to an American audience. Jacobs often brought experts in certain ethnic musics onto the show to provide background information. When no experts were available, he would not infrequently fake it - most notably in the case of "Sholem Stein", a putative Hebrew musicologist who claimed that calypso music had deep Rabbinical meanings. These were largely improvised with humorist and colleague Woody Leafer.

Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley started receiving tapes of Music and Folklore not long after the program began, so Bay Area audiences were already familiar with Jacobs when he moved to San Francisco in 1953 and took up the show in person. While still at Berkeley, Jacobs assembled two tape recorders and re-recorded many of the percussive sounds that he had recorded on the road (and in his own studio) while varying the speed of the tape as he re-recorded them, and then spliced the unusual new percussive sounds into tape loops, recording them again into a montage of loops entitled "Sonata For Loudspeakers", which first appeared on the "Radio Program No. 1" Folkways disk, and eventually was included on the 1957 Folkways album, "Sounds of New Music" (Folkways disk no. FX 6160.) Meanwhile, he continued to pursue an interest in all aspects of sound, in the composition of musique concrete, in improvisational theatre and humor. He met poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Alan Ginsberg, comedian Lenny Bruce (whose first recording was a Jacobs project, Interviews of Our Times), and percussionist Mongo Santamaría.

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