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Registered Osprey
Join Date: Mar 2003
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From the Boston Globe online:
Stephanie Barber, jazz aficionado; was 84
By Gloria Negri, Globe Staff, 8/29/2003
With her signature big hats and her even bigger personality, Stephanie Barber was a legend in the Berkshires.
In 1950, she and her late husband brought jazz to the hilltowns of Berkshire County when they founded the Music Inn in Lenox, giving jazz the respect it deserved not far from the shrine to classical music at Tanglewood. Six years later, they founded the School of Jazz in Lenox.Last weekend, after attending two musical events at Tanglewood, Mrs. Barber died of heart failure at the Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield. She was 84.
She lived in Lenox for more than 50 years and with her husband, Arthur N. Collins, also maintained a residence in New York City.
In 1956, Mrs. Barber and her late husband, Philip, opened their School of Jazz where jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk not only performed but gave lectures to jazz lovers.
It was Mrs. Barber's "magnetism and savvy," Collins said yesterday, that enabled her to lure such big names to the small pastoral towns of the Berkshires.
Mrs. Barber knew hundreds of theater people. While most people brag about knowing celebrities, friends said, it was the celebrities who bragged about knowing Mrs. Barber.
In 1961, the Barbers bought the Wheatleigh estate in Stockbridge, the former home of a countess, and ran it as a private club and inn, with a cabaret. "This was the first cabaret in the Berkshires," Collins said.
It was in that cabaret for 15 years that Mrs. Barber sang with a husky, smoky voice in a style reminiscent of Edith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich, songs that they had made famous such as "La Vie en Rose" and "Falling in Love Again."
Though she was always involved with music, her stepson, Benjamin Barber of New York City and Richmond, said Mrs. Barber did not have any musical training, except for the folk songs she sang and strummed in the 1940s and '50s.
She had a flare for fashion, as well, which was especially displayed in her scores of hats, a different one every day. Nothing Mrs. Barber did was an affectation, her stepson said, "but rather a natural expression of her spirit. She didn't have to use props. She was full of joy and generosity.Wherever she was, people felt good." Mrs. Barber was born Stephanie Frey in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, the daughter of Victor and Rose (Nager) Frey. She attended schools in Queens and graduated from Hunter College in New York City with a degree in physiology.
After graduation, she worked during the 1940s for a fashion magazine in New York City where she was so successful, her husband said, a hat designer asked her to wear one of his hats every day to whatever function she might be attending.
"That is probably where her fixation with hats began," Collins said. "Not all of her hats were big. She had one highly modernistic one that went over only half her head. It had a metallic sheen and looked like something out of Buck Rogers."
Eventually, she got a job with a New York public relations firm headed by Philip Barber, who had taught playwriting at Yale. They married in the late 1940s.
In 1961, Collins said, the Barbers bought the Wheatleigh mansion in Stockbridge from the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
"The jazz performers dressed like professional musicians and performed to an audience that came to sit and listen. Max Roach, the drummer, worked with Arthur Press, the tympanist for the BSO. Stephanie brought the jazz and classical musicians together."
The Barbers kept Wheatleigh until 1976. Mr. Barber died in 1981. Mrs. Barber and Collins, a retired professor of English at University at Albany, State University of New York, were introduced by a mutual friend and were married in 1989. He had no qualms, he said, about her retaining the name of her previous husband by which she was so widely known.
"We both loved French," Collins, who is fluent in the language, said. He said the not-so-fluent Mrs. Barber enchanted him with her French, translated, as "I don't speak fluently but am beginning to pull myself up by my boots."For a time, Mrs. Barber and Collins lived in Connecticut where she sold real estate, but they eventually returned to Lenox, Mrs. Barber's home for half a century.
Last weekend, Collins said, had been "a glorious one" for his wife. On Sunday they attended the Boston Symphony's final concert of the season at Tanglewood. On Monday, they went to the Boston Pops concert. It was there that Mrs. Barber complained of feeling ill. "Stephanie went out on the wings of song," Collins said.
In addition to her husband and stepson, Mrs. Barber leaves two sons, Charles Victor Barber of Washington, D.C., and Hilary Williams Barber of Amherst; two other stepsons, Willson Benn Barber of Becket and Nicholas Hillhouse Collins of Glens Falls, N.Y.; three stepdaughters, Edith Trelease Wyman of Beaver, W.Va., Amy Victoria Hoptay of Sewickley, Pa., and Leslie Anne Collins of Augusta, Maine; and 15 grandchildren.
Memorial services are planned.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
I'd never heard of her, but she sounds like a cool woman who did good things for jazz. R.I.P.
Last edited by bluenoter; September-22nd-2003 at 09:12 PM.
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