He could be called a collagist, whose artwork turned up in exhibitions. And he could be called an omnipresent figure on the avant-garde scene, known in and around SoHo, where he lived, both for carrying forward the sensibility of the Beat generation and for nurturing new jazz talent.

Mr. Dalachinsky was in his element on Sept. 14 at the Islip Art Museum on Long Island, where he gave a reading after having attended a concert by the Sun Ra Arkestra that afternoon in Manhattan. Not long after the reading, his wife said, he had a stroke and a cerebral hemorrhage. He died the next day at Southside Hospital in Bay Shore . He was 72 .

“The whole avant scene — music, poetry, visual art — in New York City is going to change now because he’s not around,” the guitarist Loren Connors, one of many musicians who collaborated with Mr. Dalachinsky, said by email. “He was a poet, but he had a lot of music in him. His modulation of sound and rhythm was unsurpassed.”

When he wasn’t performing himself, Mr. Dalachinsky was there, encouraging and absorbing the work of others, especially free jazz musicians, who were part of a scene he documented in a long-running monthly column for The Brooklyn Rail.