NEW YORK -- Max Gordon, the elfin, Lithuanian-born jazz lover whose tiny Village Vanguard nightclub became one of the world's most famous basements, died Thursday of complications after gallbladder surgery. He was 86.
Gordon, the patron saint of New York jazz whose Greenwich Village nightspot is the city's oldest jazz club, entered St. Vincent's Hospital for the surgery Wednesday night, but died shortly after midnight, friends of the family said.
His death followed by hours that of jazz trumpetist Woody Shaw, who had selected Max Gordon as his son's godfather.
The gruff nightclub owner, who could be found most nights chomping a cigar by the door of the jazz mecca he opened in 1934, was loved by many of the jazz greats who got their start in the Vanguard's cramped, smoke-filled, 80-seat basement room.
'He was truly a friend to the musician,' said drummer Max Roach, who remembers sneaking into the club as a youth by drawing a mustache across his upper lip with eyebrow pencil. 'All the musicians loved Max Gordon.'
Roach, who still often plays at Gordon's club where he musically came of age, recalled that the 18 members of the Mel Lewis Band, which was formed at the Vanguard and now performs there Monday nights, played at the club although they could have made more money playing elsewhere.
'They were 18 of the top musicians in New York and they would spend the money they made across the bar, which was a tribute to the way they felt about Max,' said Roach, adding that Gordon toured the Soviet Union with the band.
'If you could cite anyone, he was one of the most important people in the development, preservation and perpetuation of this music,' the drummer said.
Gordon touched every part of the show business world, providing a venue at his other clubs for such diverse talents as Barbara Streisand, Judy Holliday, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen and Pearl Bailey.
Gordon's wife of 43 years, Lorraine, said, 'He had a feel for sensing that talent in the person and all he could do was give them a place to show it and he did,' she said. 'Max was nobody's idea of a nightclub man. He was gentle, thoughtful, introspective, intellectual, with great style and taste. He just had such a commitment to art.
'The greatest talent in the world came through these doors,' she said from the club, noting the the nightspot was open Thursday night 'as Max would have wanted it.'
'He would be furious otherwise,' Lorraine Gordon said. 'He would say, 'Who's going to pay the band?''
Gordon came to the United States five years after he was born in Lithuania in 1903 and graduated from Reed College in 1924.
He opened the swank Blue Angel nightclub in New York in 1943, where chanteuse Edith Piaf made one of her first U.S. appearances, and ran it until it closed in 1964. His Le Directoire club was open only from 1948-49.
But the Village Vanguard, from which Gordon took the title of his 1980 book, 'Live at the Village Vanguard,' was the club that endured.
'That (club) was his whole life, and through that little place down there he influenced more people and helped more people than anyone will ever know,' said promoter George Wein, who founded the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954. 'He helped their careers, he helped them financially, if people needed a job, he got them a job.
Gordon was a fixture at the Vanguard well into his80s, telling Who's Who in 1987: 'I am still operating the Village Vanguard. It is open every night.'
The tiny basement club, whose walls are covered with murals depicting jazz musicians, still bears a broken light bulb smashed by an infuriated legendary composer and bassist Charles Mingus during an argument with Gordon, who left the shattered bulb as a tribute to the musician.
Sue Mingus, the widow of the bassist, said she couldn't imagine the Vanguard without Gordon. 'Max has been in there every night, even if he's asleep in his bedroom slippers,' she said.
Gordon's unflagging, widespread interest in modernity led him to stage offbeat appearances, such as readings by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac accompanied by Steve Allen on the piano in the 1960s.
Besides his wife, Gordon is survived by two daughters, Rebecca and Deborah.
