CULTURE

CIVILIZED PARTY TAKES PLACE; GUESTS ASTONISHED

Last night, in Noel Coward’s words, “I went to a marvelous party.” It was, for a change of pace, actually civilized, partly because nothing like what Coward refers to in his persistently tongue-in-cheek lyric, occurred, for example, “Elsie, who’s seventy-four,” did not say:

“A, it’s a question of being sincere,
And B, if you’re supple you’ve nothing to fear.
Then she swung upside down from a glass chandelier.
I couldn’t have liked it more.”

Actually, Elsie, in this case, was the much-loved and legendarily attuned New York musicianship teacher, Helen Hobbs Jordan, Ph. D., who had attained the astonishing age of ninety-nine – yes, 99 – and former students and friends had gathered to celebrate the occasion, at a somewhat storied but hardly flashy Italian eatery across from Carnegie Hall.

Since I had once undertaken the delightful but demanding task of becoming fluent in music and had, in my various tutelages, spent six years with the excoriating darling studying the elusive sounds that good musicianship requires, I was invited and was luckily able to sit next to the great lady, who, rather than swinging from a chandelier, spent the evening sitting in her long-resisted wheelchair, with her head resting to the side on a plump ivory pillow.

Actually, there were times when I think she dozed, but she did manage to muster her energies and tilt her up to smile and give a little wave when anything happened that particularly pleased her.

And there were items aplenty to please – most deeply, the reasons the evening felt so exceptionally civilized, even though not a single deeply philosophical discussion rumbled through the room, as one seldom does, in these conflicted times when nobody seems to have a clue what anybody else believes.

The civilized glow came from the redemptive plentitude of genuine good feeling toward her, along with a welcome absence of any patrolling self-interest, except for an occasional student still seeking, with lingering desperation, a recuperative blandishment from the exacting but famously retentive educator.

First, a number of remarkable and wonderfully generous musicians showed up to play for her, gratis, among them the inimitable jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, who attends her birthday party every year, even though, he admitted to me on this occasion, he never actually studied with her, but just admires her legendary ears greatly. Also in generous attendance were the similarly masterful jazz guitarists Gene Bertoncini and James Cerelli. (Why they’re all Italian, I have no idea; maybe a new Renaissance has subtly begun, or is trailing off.)

The three did some marvelously skillful interplay with a number of standards and then launched into the inevitable theme song of the invitingly touching evening, Happy Birthday To You.

James Byars, oboist with The New York City Ballet, stood up and spoke a few words on behalf of classical music and, in particular, of ballet’s most likely candidate for patron saint, Tchaikovsky. His brief expostulation was particularly fitting, since the dear Helen was for some time head of music theory at The Juilliard School, not to mention head of all musical testing in the tri-state area. Then he devotedly played a keynote theme from Swan Lake.

As the coup de theatre, her various helpers and students who wished to sing tributes to her took the floor. Donna, who performs the invaluable duties as Helen’s complimentary financial assistant, had located a tape students made in the mid-80’s, in which they sang various compliments and joked about her. The tape went off smilingly and one long-time friend of hers even announced that she had attended the party in which the sprightly recording was originally presented.

Then a group of students launched into a live version of Happy Birthday, but sang the tune in solfeggio, which is the aspect of music Helen taught after she had had her cranky way with you in basic theory. The familiar song goes, in that privileged language, “So, so, la, so, do, ti; so, so, la, so, re, do!”

Finally, since Helen has long been, incongruously enough, a rabid Yankee fan, they sang, once again in solfeg, Take Me Out To The Ballgame! We will spare you the do’s and so’s of that effervescent ditty.

When I inquired as to how I might contribute to the check for the widely spread banquet, I was told it had already been taken care of – no doubt by one or a group of her generously adoring admirers.

The only distressing item, a reminder of the ever-churning renewal of the city, came when I learned from another attendee that the decades-old restaurant – at which I have enjoyed many a meal, often with Helen, while recuperating from one of her nerve-knotting 3-hour lessons – was going to close in July because the entire strip of buildings in which it is housed had been bought and is to be leveled for a towering new excursion into the skyline.

I left Helen with a delicate hug and peck on her cheek, along with the sentiment, “See you at your hundredth, dear.”

Hope very much that her many grateful students and admirers, I gladly among them, will have the joy and privilege of doing so – and, once more, to experience that rarest of all contemporary items, a party that feels downright civilized.

Wish you were there to enjoy it, too, gentle reader.

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