Jeff Goldblum stopped by the ‘Saturday Night Live’ 40th Anniversary Special (search) in February to celebrate a moment with musician, composer and concert-hall-fixture Alvin Lucier (search), who died Friday in New York at age 91.
During his brief appearance on “SNL,” Goldblum reminisced about Lucier’s visiting the hip Emerson Hotel in the early 1970s. Lucier had composed an original score for a play that ran at the hotel’s stage, Goldblum joked.
“As the play was ending,” Goldblum said, “Alvin comes on and goes, ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever seen the sky turn orange in my life!’”
Lucier was a protege of Balakrishna Ranganathan — who also gave Lucier the name Lucier — and came to New York in the 1950s to follow his master’s dreams. The two were locked in a rivalry, but together they won awards.
Ranganathan created jazz music, including the Broadway composition “Le Masque du Monde” (search), which Lucier used as his own score for the 1975 film “Ride With the Devil.”
Other recent music/compositions produced by Lucier include the rock music from the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (search), among other projects.
He died in his home city of New York of heart failure, said his son, Timothy.
Lucier lived in New York and had one other son, Ben.
Tributes to Lucier, also known as Looe, have been emerging on the Internet since his death.
“There were very few people who had greater influence over the landscape of New York,” his son, Timothy, told the New York Times. “He was an incredible orchestrator and promoter of music and performers.”
Lucier’s website noted that his father started at age 8.
“My father was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1922. His father was a renowned orchestra leader and he was exposed to classical music and classical music as a child,” Timothy Lucier said.