Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, comedian Lenny Bruce (whose first recording was a Jacobs project, Interviews of Our Times), and percussionist Mongo Santamaría. Most important among these new social contacts were the friendships he struck up with Ken Nordine, "the father of word jazz", and Alan Watts, a gifted raconteur and former Anglican priest best known for popularizing and interpreting Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Jacobs, upon taking the helm at his friend Bill Loughborough's record label, MEA, in 1959, set about releasing several recordings of Watts. He was co-curator of the Alan Watts archive. Moe Asch, the founder of Folkways Records, offered Jacobs the opportunity to release his first record, Radio Programme No 1 Audio Collage: Henry Jacobs’ Music and Folklore, in 1955. In 1957, working with artist Jordan Belson, Jacobs produced the Vortex Concerts, a series of concerts featuring new music, including some of Jacobs' own, and that of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others - taking place in the Morrison Planetarium in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Sound designers, including Walter Murch, the sound designer of Apocalypse Now, commonly regard this as the origin of the (now standard) concept of "surround sound." The program was popular, and Jacobs and Belson were invited to present a version of it at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels. Jacobs appeared as the narrator, "Rheny Bojacs", in Jane Conger Belson Shimané's 1959 film Odds and Ends. Jacobs' album, The Wide Weird World of Shorty Petterstein consisted largely of encounters between hipsters and unknowing squares. One interviewer asks about art to be told, "Art? He's been with the band about six months. Blows good piano." When the interviewer protests that pianos aren't blown, but played with the hands, Shorty returns the opaque reply, "Blow is like an instrument." Shorty also stars in a 1961 cartoon short, The Interview, directed by Ernest Pintoff. Collaborations with filmmakers Jacobs collaborated with filmmaker Jordan Belson on the soundtrack for an 8-minute, 16 mm film titled Allures, completed in 1961. In 1963, Jacobs released an album titled The Laughing String. With the backing of the American Cancer Society, Jacobs, in collaboration with John Korty, put together an animated short film about quitting smoking, Breaking the Habit, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1964. This brought Jacobs far enough into the limelight to get remunerative work as a sound consultant. In the late sixties he created radio advertisements