Took piano lessons in Gig Harbor? Longtime teacher is hanging up keys after 43 years
Kimberley Joe thinks she was probably destined to be a piano teacher.
Her mom taught piano lessons and her dad owned a piano store in Gig Harbor on Wollochet Drive.
After 43 years of teaching lessons, Joe will have her final recital with her Gig Harbor students next month.
It’s hard for her to say how many she’s taught. She started giving lessons as a teenager.
She figures she’s easily had 500 students, and that maybe she’s had closer to 1,000. She constantly sees old students around town.
“I just try to get them to love music,” Joe said.
She’s almost 60 and is looking forward to being a full-time grandma, but Joe isn’t ready to think about what that final recital will be like.
“I can’t go there,” she said. “I’m going to be a mess.”
Her connection with her students goes beyond the music. Seeing them weekly, she becomes another caring adult in their lives who they talk to about the highs and lows of growing up.
“I tell them all the time: ‘Piano lessons are so much more than piano lessons,’” she said. “… We do life together.”
One of the students performing next month will be Mia Filand, a high school senior who started lessons with Joe as a kindergartner.
“She was really little and super cute and full of life,” Joe remembers about Filand starting lessons. “I did find early on that she was going to be a good student.”
She typically didn’t start students before first grade, but made an exception.
“My mom signed me up for lessons, because as a little girl I had always seemed to be very connected to music, so she thought piano lessons would be a great thing for me to start,” Filand said. “I think over time our relationship has gone from a teacher-student relationship to more of a friendship.”
She remembers Joe as being warm and welcoming from the start.
“I talk to her about my life and my relationships, and I laugh and I’ve cried to her,” the 17-year-old said. “She’s always understood that piano is a big part of my life, but it’s not my entire life. I think the fact that she’s been so empathetic with me has made her a really special teacher.”
The two were the subject of a Gateway story years ago that touched on another bond they share. Both are adopted.
“We don’t mention it too often, but we do share that, and I think that’s very special,” Filand said.
Joe said she remembers telling Mia somewhere along the line: “I just know you come from music. Someone in your background is musical.”
“What she has been able to show in the past, you’re born with,” Joe explained. “She just has a beautiful natural musicality inside of her that I did not have to teach, if that makes sense.”
Joe said her own birth father, who passed away last year, was an avid fiddle player.
“He was extremely musical,” she said. “We both loved to sing, we both harmonize. I never knew where I got my ability to harmonize. … I was thankfully placed in a home where music was accessible and a big deal, but my roots came from him.”
As she and Filand looked at an old copy of the Gateway article at a recent lesson, they laughed.
“You looked so serious in that one,” Joe said, pointing at one of the photos of Filand as a little girl.
Joe pointed out that the end of the song Filand has planned for the final recital will be the “last notes you’ll ever play.”
Filand had been thinking about that, too.
‘Hard to leave’
Students say Joe adjusts her expectations to fit where they’re at in their lives, and she sees their milestones.
Madison Bunn started lessons in about 2008, when she was in first grade, and continued until she graduated high school.
“I was a very shy little kid, but I wanted to play piano so badly,” she said. “She always made me feel so comfortable.”
Bunn and Joe grew close during Bunn’s high school years. Lessons would start with talking about her week, friendships and boyfriends, and they’d laugh together.
“We’d have so much fun,” Bunn said. “That’s what made it really special for me and hard to leave.”
It was especially difficult to finish lessons during the pandemic, she said. Bunn’s final piece was a recording on YouTube, instead of an in-person recital.
She’d been looking forward to that final recital for years. Joe made it special by also posting a speech about her.
Even after the lessons ended, they’d grab coffee together.
“She definitely was like a second mom to me,” Bunn said.
Bunn shadowed another student before she started lessons all those years ago, to make sure it was something she wanted to do.
She always remembered the other girl, and last year they coincidentally ended up on a backpacking trip together with friends in the North Cascades.
They instantly recognized one another, shared memories of their lessons with Joe, and sent the piano teacher a picture.
Bannack Stebor, another longtime student, said he thinks he met Joe when he was 6 or 7.
“I’ve been playing for just shy of 30 years now,” he said.
His grandmother was a concert pianist.
“When she passed away, I had said I wanted to be just like her, and so my grandpa sent her grand piano to my mother and my mother signed me up with Kimberley,” Stebor said.
His sister also studied with her through her senior year of high school.
“Kimberley is the most fabulous, happy person ever,” he said. “She is hands down the best teacher that you could ever ask to start piano with, I’ll say that much.”
Stebor said Joe, who has been part of the Washington State Music Teachers Association chapter in Gig Harbor, was one of four main piano teachers in town.
“I think that even if you weren’t one of Kimberley’s students, you knew who Kimberley was,” he said.
He said he was one of Joe’s first students who ever drove themselves to her lessons, and he remembers her daughter as a small child. She teaches piano now, too.
“It was a place to go and you were comfortable,” Stebor said. “It was wonderful.”
He and Joe took a photo after each of his recitals, and he’ll be at her final recital next month.
“Are you kidding?” he said. “Of course. I’m not going to miss that.”
