[Dixielandjazz] Phoebe Jacobs Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

RIP Phoebe Jacobs. She loved Louis Armstrong, established the Louis  
Armstrong Educational Foundation , was instrumental in getting the the  
Flushing Meadow Tennis Complex to name its second largest court venue  
Louis Armstrong Stadium, and almost single handedly got a postage  
stamp in his honor, etc.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

Phoebe Jacobs, Publicist for Jazz Greats, Dies at 93
NY Times - by Nate Chinen  - May 4, 2012

Among the many jazz stories that Phoebe Jacobs delighted in telling,  
one always stood out as characteristic of her tenacious and  
resourceful service to the music. It was the wee hours of an April  
morning in the 1950s, and Ella Fitzgerald had finished her last set at  
Basin Street East in Midtown. Ms. Jacobs, a publicist and general  
assistant for the club at the time, was walking her to the door when  
Fitzgerald, glancing at her wristwatch, casually remarked that it was  
her birthday.

Ms. Jacobs, while wishing her a happy birthday, discovered that one of  
the greatest jazz singers had never had a proper birthday party. So  
she got to work, calling hotel concierges around the city to corral  
celebrity guests for a surprise party at the club less than 24 hours  
later.

The honoree was well loved, and an easy sell — but judging from the  
names on the guest list, Ms. Jacobs must have also applied her  
renowned powers of persuasion. It included Duke Ellington, Benny  
Goodman and Stan Kenton as well as Mickey Mantle and Vice President  
Richard M. Nixon.

Ms. Jacobs told the story on March 25 at a music conference at New  
York University. Soon afterward she was admitted to Beth Israel  
Hospital in Manhattan, said her son, Jerry Fella, and died there on  
April 9. She was 93.

In a sprawling behind-the-scenes career in jazz, primarily in  
publicity, Ms. Jacobs worked for some of the biggest stars in the  
field, including Fitzgerald, Ellington, Goodman, Sarah Vaughan and  
Peggy Lee. Fiercely devoted to her clients, she was not only their  
publicist, but also their minder, advocate and aide-de-camp.

“She has a good understanding of how show business impinges on the  
verities of jazz,” the critic Whitney Balliett once wrote, and his  
observation, however true, probably underestimated how much feeling  
she had for show business, and especially for the ways it could be  
harnessed for her artists’ benefit.

She was close to Louis Armstrong during his final decade, and  
tirelessly promoted his legacy after his death in 1971. At his request  
she established the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, where she  
was executive vice president, helping to finance a range of programs,  
including the Louis Armstrong music therapy department at Beth Israel  
Medical Center.

An expert at leveraging the power of celebrity for civic causes, Ms.  
Jacobs was the driving force behind the naming of Louis Armstrong  
Stadium, in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, and Louis Armstrong Airport,  
in New Orleans. She spearheaded a letter-writing campaign that led to  
a Louis Armstrong postage stamp in 1995, the same year the Armstrong  
Foundation inaugurated the Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp.

She also brokered the arrangements that led to the establishment of a  
Louis Armstrong Archives at Queens College, and later the Louis  
Armstrong House Museum, in the modest brick house in Corona that  
Armstrong and his wife, Lucille, called home. “There were many days  
where I would have four or five letters from Phoebe in the mail,” said  
Michael Cogswell, director of the museum. “She didn’t use e-mail; she  
was old school.”

Phoebe Pincus was born on June 21, 1918, in a fifth-floor walk-up in  
the Bronx — on a kitchen table, she liked to recall, because of her  
mother’s mistrust of hospitals. Her mother, the former Beatrice  
Watkins, was the youngest of 12 children; her father, Hyman Pincus,  
was a bootlegger and a gambler.

She herself first married at 18, and was married twice more. Her third  
husband, Lou Jacobs, died of a brain tumor years ago. In addition to  
her son, she is survived by a daughter, Susan Devens; four  
grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

It was through a relative on her mother’s side, Ralph Watkins, that  
Ms. Jacobs found her way into the nightclub world, working as a  
hatcheck girl at Kelly’s Stable on 52nd Street, which he owned. There  
she met Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and the arranger Sy Oliver, who  
got her a job at Decca Records.

As a contractor for the label, Ms. Jacobs was responsible for  
contacting and hiring musicians for recording sessions. When Watkins  
became a part owner of Basin Street East, she began working at that  
club. Later she became the director of public relations and producer  
of special events for the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Plaza, where she  
booked Ellington, Goodman and others.

In 1989, she helped establish the Jazz Foundation of America, a  
nonprofit that provides support to musicians in need.

Though she regarded her clients as legends, she made a point of seeing  
them first as people, with human lives and emotions. She described  
Benny Goodman as an absent-minded professor and Sarah Vaughan as a  
child who never grew up. And then there was Armstrong.

“I don’t believe Louis Armstrong was a real human being,” she said in  
an interview for “Jazz,” Ken Burns’s 2000 documentary series. “I  
believe — I still believe — that God sent him to this earth to be a  
special messenger, to make people happy.”