Showing posts with label Lionel Ziprin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lionel Ziprin. Show all posts

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Lionel Ziprin, 84: "A brilliant, baffling, beguiling voice of the Lower East Side and the East Village"

The Times has the obituary today for Lionel Ziprin, who died this past Sunday. He was 84.

Mr. Ziprin, a brilliant, baffling, beguiling voice of the Lower East Side and the East Village in all its phases — Jewish, hipster and hippie — died last Sunday in Manhattan. He was 84. The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his daughter Zia Ziprin said.

For decades, Mr. Ziprin, a self-created planet, exerted a powerful gravitational attraction for poets, artists, experimental filmmakers, would-be philosophers and spiritual seekers.

He ran his apartment, on Seventh Street in the East Village, as a bohemian salon, attracting a loose collective that included the ethnomusicologist Harry Smith, the photographer Robert Frank and the jazz musician Thelonious Monk, who would drop by for meals between sets at the Five Spot. Bob Dylan paid the occasional visit.


And now: Songs for Schizoid Siblings by Lionel Ziprin and Leyna d'Ancona...