On the evening of April 13, 2006, Cobi Narita, 80, spoke to an audience of regular Harlem Speaks attendees and guests whose lives have been touched by her generosity, professionalism and love of jazz.

The second oldest of five siblings, Cobi grew up in Highland Park on the eastside of Los Angeles. In junior high school she played glockenspiels (or orchestra bells), but realized that her fate did not lay in being a musician.

Way before her involvement in the business and promotion of jazz came the despicable internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II, after Pearl Harbor. Her family was forced to leave their home; instead of selling their valuables such as kimonos and rare dolls for a paltry 5c per item, her mother burned them.

She noted that it was very difficult for Japanese women in the camps due to the lack of privacy. Cobi also remembered the enterprise of her ethnic community, who began gardening in the desert because they wanted fresh vegetables.

Since she was a youngster, Cobi didn’t realize just how bad things were. She began a newsletter, and several clubs such as “The Royal Thespians” and a “Girl’s Club” for dancing. But she soon understood “that my parents had lost everything.” For a year after release from the camp, her family lived in a trailer; initially she went to college in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, sent by the U.S. government.

While there she visited a nearby camp where other Japanese folks lived, and attended a dance. Since she was one of the few young women there who liked to boogie, many of the young men wanted to keep step with her, one of which she married and eventually had seven daughters. She divorced him after ten years of marriage.

When asked by Loren Schoenberg what she thought of this nation in light of her family’s experience, which included her mother dying from cancer contracted from desert fever, she said, “If you can get around the political, you can get to what’s good about the country. Measuring the pros and the cons, the pros far outweigh the cons.”

She raised her children in Ventura, California, and worked three jobs to support them. She began her long history of volunteerism at a spot called “Memory Lane,” where she began meeting many of the musicians she had been hearing on the radio.

A bass player named Gene Taylor told her if she ever came to New York to look him up; as fate would have it, she ran into him in Central Park soon after arriving in the Big Apple. He told her about the Jazz Vespers, led by the Rev. John Gensel at St. Peter’s Church. She began volunteering there immediately, and also began working with Jazz Interactions, “the first big jazz organization.”

In 1973 she met bassist Reggie Workman, who brought her into an organization titled “Collective Black Artists,” whose members included “many of the best musicians in the country.” She began doing administrative work for it, and was soon selected to be Executive Director, a post she held for two years. Her expertise brought the group a grant of $125,000 during her tenure. (This is just one of many grants that she has garnered for musicians and organizations over the years.)

>From there she formed her own organizations such as the Universal Jazz Coalition, housed at a large loft space, the Jazz Center of NY, funded by her beloved husband of 30 years, Paul Ash of the Sam Ash Music Stores; and the International Women in Jazz, which held festivals at various places in NYC. The first was at the Casablanca Club.

“So many people were coming that they wanted to raise the rental fee, and chained their doors when we refused—we were barely able to pay the musicians.” So in a stroke of creative and public relations genius, Cobi and her team decided to hold that night’s performance outside of the club. “I never forget it: Mary Lou Williams came and sat on a crate as dignified as if she were in Carnegie Hall.” The media were present in a big way, so much so that when George Wein arrived, he said, “You can’t pay for this kind of press!”

The next night the festival performances were held at the Carnegie Recital Hall, donated by Mr. Wein. Today, one can bask in her motherly presence at Cobi’s Place.