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I was commuting three to four hours a day, I had jobs for much of it. But I was always involved in going to some ensemble someplace. Taking my lessons at the local Jewish community center on Staten Island.

Jon Gordon

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Jon Gordon
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: January 20
Businessperson
Consultant
Writer
Much
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Always
Involved
Island
Four
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Locals
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Jewish
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Center
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More quotes by Jon Gordon

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Life and success are about what you choose to believe.
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I didn't always have time to practice as much as I wanted to do, that was a real problem for me in high school and college.
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When I heard Charlie Parker the first time on a record, it had seemed like an old, scratchy kind of record and I didn't get it.
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Phil [Wood] was known for having a little bit of a gruff manner, but he was all heart.
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You fuel your life with trust and love instead of fear and doubt.
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We listened [with my mother] to [Frank] Sinatra and Glen Campbell and we had some Beatles records that I liked. This was in the '70s.
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[Manhattan School Of Music] didn't' have a jazz undergraduate program at the time so I played a semester in the big band. There was a graduate program. But I wasn't really that involved in jazz yet.
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I think what frustrated me more than anything else in my formative years was that I just had to work. I had to have a job. Like twenty to thirty hours a week, a lot of times in high school and college. And that was hard.
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It's very unlikely you're a genius, but, if you're ready to work at it hard and you want to listen to music all the time and you want to learn about it and you want to be around the people who do it, you'll find your own way.
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I'm very gratified that I had my little 15 minutes,or whatever [at the Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition]. It certainly didn't make me rich and famous. But it helped a little bit for a while.
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The Monk competition did open some doors. And I was thankful for that.
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Walk down Forest Ave to Joey's Pizza like we used to do after performances, which doesn't exist anymore. We had a sense of community [in the school band].
Jon Gordon
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If you are complaining you can't be thinking about or creating what you do want.
Jon Gordon
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Instead of being disappointed about where you are, be optimistic about where you are going.
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We were poor [with my mother], and we didn't have too much. So we sat on the floor and we had a record player, and that's all we had in that room in the apartment. But we had whatever we had. Six records and a record player and it seemed like magic. Seven or eight years old, you know.
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I learned some classical music history, which I had done quite a bit at of Performing Arts. But I got some more with a great teacher named David Noon, who I've been in contact with quite a bit in recent years.
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Bob [Gordon] died young tragically.
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There are a lot of people that impacted me. I remember hearing Oscar Peterson live at the Blue Note, which was very expensive, but... $50 in the '80s... hard to come up with. But it was amazing.
Jon Gordon
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Joe Henderson with Ron Carter and Al Foster at the Vanguard was just wow. And the energy of the three of them.
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Great leaders don't succeed because they are great. They succeed because they bring out the greatness in others.
Jon Gordon