[Dixielandjazz] Helen Hobbs Jordan Obit

[Steve barbone]

Another legend has passed. She was a monster music teacher as OKOMers Bucky
Pizzarelli and Tony Bennett will attest. They don't make them like Ms Jordan
any more.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

Helen Hobbs Jordan, 99, Music Teacher to Generations, Is Dead

NY TIMES - By DANIEL J. WAKIN - Published: April 28, 2006

Helen Hobbs Jordan, an exacting and tart-tongued music teacher who
instructed generations of performers in ear training and theory, including
Melissa Manchester, Bette Midler and Tony Bennett, died on Wednesday at her
suite in the Salisbury Hotel, near Carnegie Hall. She was 99.

Mrs. Jordan left no immediate survivors, said Mary Jo Kaplan, a friend and
former student, but her family was huge: a legion of devoted former pupils
who tended to her needs.

One volunteered as her doctor, another as her accountant, another as her
money manager. Others brought groceries and took her to dinner. Early last
year, as Mrs. Jordan's money began running out, the group put on a benefit
concert that raised more than $40,000, including large checks from Ms.
Midler and Mr. Bennett.

For more than 50 years, Mrs. Jordan taught sight singing, score reading and
other fundamentals. But she also drummed in different sorts of lessons, like
the importance of decorum, honesty and the pursuit of perfection.

"I don't tolerate errors," an elegantly dressed Mrs. Jordan said in an
interview with The New York Times in January 2005. "If you have a brain, for
God's sake, use it."

Her students included the guitarists Bucky Pizzarelli and Gene Bertoncini;
the singers Lesley Gore and Paul Simon; and the actor and director Carl
Reiner. Future stars and those who were already stars came to her to polish
the basics. 

Melissa Manchester said she studied sight singing with Mrs. Jordan in the
early 1970's. 

"I was just so impressed by her strength and character and her desire for
excellence," Ms. Manchester said. "That's what she wanted for her students.
I was sort of sloppy around the edges regarding my musicianship. But she
kept me humble and clear-sighted in terms of really not compromising."

Mrs. Jordan carved out a niche among jingle singers, teaching them how to
walk into a studio and immediately master a singing line, without rehearsal,
during expensive recording sessions.

"She taught the top," said Ms. Kaplan, a producer at Showtime.

For years Mrs. Jordan conducted classes at Steinway Hall in Manhattan. She
self-published more than a dozen books laying out her method.

Helen Hobbs was born in Topeka, Kan., on April 6, 1907. Her father, Charles
Hobbs, was later elected Kansas insurance commissioner, and her mother, Emma
Swisher, taught piano. She received her undergraduate degree in music from
Washburn University in Topeka.

In the 1930's she moved to New York City to continue a career as a
violinist, attending the Juilliard School and Teachers College at Columbia.
At one point she gave concerts on long train trips, and she toured Europe
before World War II.

She grew frustrated with the violin and spontaneously gave it away to a cab
driver whose instrument had been stolen. She went on to lead the general
musicianship department of the American Theater Wing's professional school.

Mrs. Jordan was briefly married to Robert Jordan, a lawyer, before they
divorced in the early 1950's. She had a long relationship with David
Collyer, a Broadway singer and teacher, who died in 1996, and to the end
kept a publicity photograph of him in her sitting room. She was godmother to
his daughter, Ingrid Saxon, and they remained close.

"She just didn't want to play second fiddle to anybody," Ms. Manchester
said. "She just wanted to star in her own life, and I think she did."