On October 8, 1979, David Izenzon died of a heart attack in New York, aged 47. He had started on the bass at 24, after singing in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and within a few years was playing in Ornette Coleman’s trio, from the 1962 Town Hall concert through the mid-1960s European tours. Then he changed careers. By the 1970s he held a doctorate and was practicing psychotherapy, and in June 1978 he founded Pot Smokers Anonymous, a nonprofit Manhattan program whose nine-week course had heavy users taper off while learning “emotional recognition skills,” logged under the acronym FLAP: fear, anger, love, pain. That December he spent nearly an hour on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air taking calls about the drug. He had also written a jazz opera, How Music Can Save the World, premiered in 1975. The program outlived him, run by one of its own graduates.
Sources: David Izenzon — Wikipedia (born Pittsburgh May 17, 1932; died October 8, 1979, heart attack, Bellevue Hospital; Coleman association from October 1961 and the 1962 Town Hall concert; doctorate in psychotherapy; jazz opera How Music Can Save the World, 1975) , Izenzon, David — Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, entry by Lewis Porter, via Encyclopedia.com (synagogue singer; bass from 1956; Coleman trio 1962–66 with work in England and Europe; psychiatry field in the 1970s; opera premiered 1975; died N.Y., October 8, 1979, after a heart attack) , David Izenzon on the Effects of Marijuana — Fresh Air with Terry Gross, December 15, 1978 (53-minute call-in segment on Pot Smokers Anonymous; earlier appearances September 14 and December 12, 1978) , From the Archives: Fear of Flying (1994) — High Times (Potsmokers Anonymous founded in New York in June 1978 by Dr. David Izenzon as a nonprofit; nine-week course, “emotional recognition skills,” FLAP; later directed by graduate Francis Duffy after Izenzon’s death)
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