[Dixielandjazz] Phoebe Jacobs (New York Daily News)

[Robert Ringwald]

Hear the Sweet Sounds of Justice
by Stanley Crouch
New York Daily News, April 16, 2012
Life often boils down to simple things if one learns how to look. The recent deaths
of John Payton, who was president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Phoebe Jacobs,
who died last week at 93, were connected by their sense of two things that transcended
ideology: fair play and the deepening of civilization through empathy.
I have already written about how Payton's legal battles against injustice were far
more effective than the extremism of the 1960s. An exceptional lawyer, he towered
above the radical loons who hampered the message of the civil rights movement.
Louis Armstrong understood what the trouble underlined by the civil rights movement
was. In Ken Burns' documentary "Jazz," Armstrong can be seen explaining the denial
of constitutional rights symbolized by the violence in Little Rock, Ark., over school
integration. Armstrong said that whites in the South had been taught all of the national
rights, but preferred to pretend that they did not know about them.
He famously said of the attempts to keep the Little Rock Nine out of Central High
School: "The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go
to hell."
Knowing what the deal really was, the musician courageously stood his ground because
he knew that fair play needed no passport -- nor, for that matter, did evil. Both
went where they could. So Armstrong added his music to the civil rights movement,
for which he was one of our greatest ambassadors.
Phoebe Jacobs left us at 93 last week. She was rough and she was tough and showed
much love to all she believed in. Jacobs was the daughter of a bootlegger, had worked
in jazz clubs since she was in her late teens and became connected through publicity
work to many great artists in an up-close and personal way.
One of the greatest was Armstrong, who started the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation
in 1969. Jacobs became the executive vice president of the foundation, and is one
of the most forceful reasons why it remains committed to musical education and a
fellowship beyond all divisions: race, sex, religion and geography. It remains dedicated
to what Armstrong believed: If you got it, you got it; it don't make a damn bit of
difference who you are or where you come from.
That is the same thing that John Payton dedicated his life to from a legal and political
perspective. Both men had a deep and mature masculinity far above and far beyond
the slogan-oriented partisanship that reduces manhood to an embarrassing and dangerous
cartoon too easily consumed by extremists of any persuasion.
By the time you read this, we at the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation will
have had a party celebrating the humane side of Jacobs and all that she was connected
to, in or out of music. We will have celebrated her by listening to the music she
so completely loved, played by a group of New Orleans jazz artists led by the magnificent
drummer Herlin Riley.
Riley's art, just like Armstrong's, sweeps up everything needed to express the deepest
sense of humanity and bittersweet joy; it comes from the church, the street and the
communal sense of self-expression deepened by close listening and instantaneous support
of fellow artists.
This is also what John Payton and all dedicated to deepening the quality of American
civilization have always locked arms with, literally or spiritually -- but usually
both.
Through Payton and Jacobs, we can accurately imagine the nation at its best, as a
jazz bandstand infused with an integrity too powerful to be silenced by the shouts
of sloganeers or extremists.