PHOTO BY HILARY BOVAY
Closing out a half-century career as The Cleveland Orchestra’s longest-serving principal player, Joela Jones talks about her passions for music and music-making — and the extraordinary people she’s worked with onstage and off.
OPPOSITE PAGE:
Joela Jones with Richard Weiss and (top) their son Justin.
Distinguished Artist
JOELA JONES merely about playing notes for Joela Jones. Growing up in Miami, Florida, she first learned to play piano from her mother, Inez Alma Jordan Jones. Though young Joela showed immediate promise at the keyboard, her mother wanted her to delve deeper. Having majored in English literature, Mrs. Jones introduced Joela to the poetry she loved: Keats, Shelley, Browning, and Tennyson. U S I C WA S N E V E R
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by Amanda Angel
“She shaped me in so many ways musically, and intellectually and emotionally,” Jones recalls. “Even when I was seven, eight, nine years old, while I would be playing a slow movement of something beautiful, at home learning and practicing, she would be sitting beside me reciting the saddest, the most grief stricken, or most beautiful poems of these English poets because she wanted me to go beyond the notes. She wanted me to be sure and have
