Piano teacher left an indelible mark

Anne Macfarlane Jones' career as an accompanist was taking off, with a stint on NBC's national broadcasts from New York's Lincoln Center, when her husband's news came. He was being transferred to Puerto Rico.

She chose family over performing and channeled her talent and lively mind to becoming a world-traveled piano teacher for hundreds of students, an inveterate reader and a friend of news and literature luminaries. She died Dec. 26 in Seattle of pneumonia at the age of 76.

She was an imposing figure to her students. Pamela Kalt recalls Mrs. Jones immaculately dressed in jewels and a tweed suit, taking as keen an interest in her students' lives as in their playing. Kalt was so impressed that she copied her teacher's fluid penmanship.

"She listened to me probably more than my own parents listened when I was an adolescent," said Kalt, a New Yorker who became a professional singer. "She took me out of my little blue-collar element and gave me culture."

Mrs. Jones was the daughter of Seattle socialites, Vivian and Robert Macfarlane, a piano teacher and president of Northern Pacific Railroad. An engagement to the son of another Seattle family was covered in The Seattle Times' society column — but it became one of several broken engagements by the independent-minded woman, according to her daughter, Eudocia Reed.

While attending Smith College in Massachusetts, she met a former Army sergeant and Amherst student still recovering from the trauma of liberating the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. Raymond Jones was so smitten he told his future wife he had a rare recording of "La Traviata," which she was studying as a music major. She expressed interest, and he had to rush out and order a copy.

During their 51-year marriage they hopscotched the world, following Ray Jones' career as an executive with the General Motors Acceptance Corp. While teaching piano in Honolulu early in the marriage, Mrs. Jones was invited to study with Robert and Gaby Casadesus in Paris.

At the end of nearly a year there, Ray Jones was transferred to his company's New York office, and his wife's career flourished. While tutoring 40 students a week, Mrs. Jones accompanied soloist Judith Raskin and appeared on the NBC's "Recital Hall" series. She considered piano a forum for conversation, critiquing others' playing by saying, "They can play every note, but they're not telling me anything."

As neighbors to an NBC news executive, the Joneses also became friends with newsmen David Brinkley and Chet Huntley. During a cocktail party, Brinkley told Ray Jones that he needed his papers appraised in order to donate them to a university.

Jones suggested his wife, who had no such experience, and she slapped a $50,000 price tag on the collection. Brinkley paid her with a case of scotch, said Conrad Wesselhoeft, a family friend who heard the story years later from Ray Jones.

Mrs. Jones' stage career ended with her husband's transfer to Puerto Rico. Their daughter said her mother had to choose between her family and the joy of performing. "I have no doubt, if they'd stayed, she would have become famous," Reed said.

Mrs. Jones remained involved in music, acting as a liaison between the Universidad Católica in Puerto Rico and the Peabody Conservatory.

The couple figured out how to slip a dismantled Steinway piano past customs agents in Saudi Arabia, when Ray Jones' career took the family there, and learned to play the 'ud, a round-bellied, fretless guitar used in Middle Eastern music.

The Joneses returned to Seattle in the early 1980s, settling in a West Seattle home with views of the Olympics. Ray Jones regularly got ship manifests to track the traffic below, before he passed away in 2000.

Although Mrs. Jones continued teaching, she suffered from shingles in 1983 that damaged her left shoulder. She rarely played again. Instead, she kept her intellectual curiosity sharp with a personal library of nearly 1,000 books, many of them kept in a music room filled with artifacts from a life of traveling.

"You walk into the door and all your loudness and goofiness goes out the door," said Wesselhoeft, whose three children were taught by Mrs. Jones. "You were reverential."

When she grew increasingly ill this winter, Mrs. Jones declined to have a CD player brought into her hospital room. "I'm hearing music in my head," she told her daughter. " 'La Traviata.' It's your father. He's luring me again."

Besides daughter Eudocia, Anne Macfarlane Jones is survived her son, Andrew M. Jones of San Francisco; her brother, Robert S. Macfarlane of Phoenix; and three grandchildren.

A memorial service is scheduled at 2 p.m. Saturday at Salty's on Alki.

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jonathanmartin@seattletimes.com.