The Spotlight Finds Jacobs

For more than 70 years, Phoebe Jacobs has been a force in the jazz world and a leading lady in the music business — without ever singing or playing a note. Since the late 1930s, Ms. Jacobs has worked at and helped run at least three important jazz clubs, done contracting and producing for major record labels, and founded and organized several major music-oriented philanthropic organizations. She has been a key figure in the personal and professional lives of such jazz greats as Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and especially, Louis Armstrong. To borrow Leonard Feather’s phrase, she has been a critical “earwitness” to jazz history.Tomorrow night, Ms. Jacobs will be saluted by the JVC Jazz Festival with a program at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College. It’s an unprecedented public celebration for a woman who has never shined the spotlight on herself — and who even declined to have her photograph taken with any of the legends with whom she worked.In a telephone interview last week, Ms. Jacobs talked about her life behind the curtain in jazz, including how she got her first exposure to the music through her uncle, Ralph Watkins.“My mother was a classical music fan and an opera nut,” she said, “and my uncle Ralph introduced me to jazz when I was 13 years old, when he played Duke Ellington for me.”During Prohibition, the Watkins family owned a speakeasy, which, after repeal, they converted into a jazz club called Kelly’s Stables. “I was gung-ho to hear the music, but I was too young to go in the club. So Ralph let me work in the hat check room, hanging up coats, just so I could hear the music.”Ms. Jacobs was busy checking coats on a momentous night when Billie Holiday was the featured attraction and the King Cole Trio, led by Nat King Cole, then a young pianist from Chicago by way of Los Angeles, was doubling as both accompaniment and supporting act.“One night Billie didn’t show up, and [Ralph] said to Nat, ‘You’re gonna have to sing tonight, buddy; I heard you at rehearsal — you’re not bad!’ That was the first time that Nat sang publicly.”After a brief marriage produced two children in the mid-1940s, Ms. Jacobs went to work for Decca Records under the arranger-conductor Sy Oliver and the producer Milt Gabler, both of whom she had met at Kelly’s. She was initially hired to work in the office, but was soon given a rare position for a woman at that time. “Sy and Milt knew that I was raising two kids on my own, so they made me a contractor. Sy trained me. He said, ‘Charlie Shavers would be good for this date, and get Tyree Glenn for that, too.’ We would categorize the musicians so I knew whom to get, whether they were backing Sammy Davis Jr, Ethel Merman, Pearl Bailey, we had all those people on Decca. I used to get $82.50 every time I booked a date, and that was a lot of money, honey!”In 1956, her uncle Ralph opened a new, more elaborate club called Basin Street, on the West Side. When that building was demolished, Watkins relocated to the East Side with the new Basin Street East, which, for 10 years, was one of the city’s highest-profile jazz rooms. Ms. Jacobs worked as a general assistant and took care of everything that needed taking care of, both for Watkins and the talent that played there. She grew especially close to Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and his wife, Lil.Ms. Jacobs met Lee at Kelly’s around 1941, when Lee was the featured singer with Benny Goodman’s Orchestra. But during the Basin Street years, they became family. “We were close because my son had married her niece, and Peggy made the wedding in her house. We were machatunim. In fact, Peggy became so Jewish that she even made my son a seder! She was mad for him. She called Danny Thomas and said, ‘Listen I gotta make a seder for this Jewish kid. You better give me all the stuff!’ So she hid the matzohs, but her dog peed on them! But during those years, we were a real family. She would play the club three times a year for five weeks and there would be lines around the block every night.”But Lee was not the only jazz queen who found a place in Ms. Jacobs’s heart. She also organized the first ever birthday party for the First Lady of jazz. “One night, after we got off work, it was about 3 a.m., and Ella looked at her wrist watch and said, ‘You can wish me happy birthday.’ I asked her, ‘What was the best birthday party you ever had?’ She gave me a look like I killed somebody, and she said, ‘Whoever had a birthday party? I was never in any place long enough where I knew enough people to have a party even if I wanted one.’ So I said, ‘You don’t mind if I order a cake or something?’ She said, ‘Sure, make sure it’s marshmallow and pineapple. Disgustingly sweet!'”Ms. Jacobs began calling the concierges at every prominent hotel in Midtown to find out what showbiz celebrities were in town, and she invited them all to Basin Street for a surprise party; she also called in a connection with the New York Yankees, because “Ella was crazy about baseball players.” She told Fitzgerald to get dressed for an interview at the club, “which she absolutely hated doing. I picked her up in a limousine and she glared at me the whole time.” When the two walked into the club, everybody yelled “Surprise!,” including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Stan Kenton — even Mickey Mantle and Vice President Nixon. “She took her pocket book and hit me on my head!”After Basin Street, Ms. Jacobs married again and worked at Rockefeller Center, booking music in both the Rainbow Room and the Rainbow Grill. She co-founded the Jazz Foundation of America in 1989, a support organization for musicians in need of medical care, and she also worked with Louis Armstrong to establish a foundation in his name, even though her initial reaction was to talk him out of it.“I sat there when Louis formed it with his own $40,000. I said, ‘Pops, what are you doing? Frank Sinatra doesn’t have his own foundation. What do you need a foundation for?’ He said ‘Shut up! I want to give back to the world some of the goodness that I got out of it. I want to help some kids. And you’re going to take care of it for me!'”Today the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation continues to subsidize a variety of medical programs and instructional programs, such as the Louis Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp, in New Orleans, and the Louis Armstrong House and Archives, in Queens.“I got news for you, that’s my dedication, I’m doing what Pops wants, honey. He’s still alive and well, you don’t see him but he’s here. You walk into that house, you can feel his presence.”wfriedwald@nysun.com

The Spotlight Finds Jacobs

The Spotlight Finds Jacobs

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