Bijan Pakzad, 71, a Beverly Hills designer of ultra-luxury clothing, perfume and jewelry, died of a stroke Saturday, said his son, Nicolas Pakzad.
Pakzad, who was born in Iran, came to the U.S. in the 1970s and opened a Rodeo Drive boutique.
From the moment in 1976 when Pakzad first opened Bijan, his Rodeo Drive emporium, three words bedecked the entrance: “By appointment only.” The locked-door policy made clear that Pakzad exclusively catered to men who had money, power or fame — and usually all three. His clients included President Barack Obama, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Stevie Wonder, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Jordan.
He boasted that his Bijan label included the most expensive menswear in the world, with suits costing thousands of dollars.
Huey P. Meaux, 82, who discovered recording artists Doug Sahm and Barbara Lynn before scandal and prison ended Meaux’s career, died Saturday at his home in Winnie, Texas, said his nephew, Larry Meaux Jr.
In addition to discovering Lynn and San Antonio-born singer-songwriter Sahm, Meaux revived the recording career of Freddy Fender. Meaux produced Fender’s chart-topper “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.”
In 1996, police raided Meaux’s studio in Houston and found hundreds of videotapes and photos of him having sex with underage girls. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to molesting a teenage girl and other charges. He was released four years ago.
Max Mathews, 84, often called the father of computer music, died Thursday in San Francisco, said his son Vernon.
Mathews wrote the first program to make it possible for a computer to synthesize sound and play it back. He also developed several generations of computer-music software and electronic instruments.
He was an engineer at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1957 when he wrote the first version of Music, a program that allowed an IBM 704 mainframe computer to play a 17-second composition of his own devising.
Because computers at the time were slow, it would have taken an hour to synthesize the piece, so it had to be transferred to tape and then speeded up to the proper tempo. But the experiment proved that sound could be digitized, stored and retrieved.
Denver Post wire services
