Henry Jacobs and Shorty Petterstein

With Hurricane Sandy bearing down on New York, I thought it only fitting to visit with another Sandy—Henry Sandy Jacobs. He's a sound artist and humorist who in the 1950s all but invented the hipster comedy album on the West Coast. His Wide Weird World of Shorty Petterstein featured funny fictional conversational encounters between clueless squares and all-knowing hipsters.

The point was to poke gentle fun at both the middle-brow inquisitor and the eccentric jazz musician. For more on Jacobs, go to Fred Seibert's Frederator blog here and to radio station WFMU here. As you scroll down the second site, be sure to click on the audio links with titles like “A History of Jazz" and “Origins of Jazz Terms."

Here's a Jacobs cartoon from 1961 called The Interview. Many thanks to William Forbes for sending it along...