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When I was 13, 14, 15, I had played in a couple of jazz ensembles. I didn't know anything about harmony, about II-V-I, though I had learned my scales with Caesar [DiMauro].

Jon Gordon

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Jon Gordon
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: January 20
Businessperson
Consultant
Writer
Couple
Learned
Ensembles
Though
Caesar
Didn
Ensemble
Anything
Scales
Harmony
Jazz
Played

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Negative thoughts are the nails that build a prison of failure.
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I think we're in a time and place, the last 20 plus years, and certainly now, it's only more so, where it's just about us creating a body of work. Creating hopefully our own scene.
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I would sit in at a jazz brunch [at sweet Basil] with Eddie Chamblee, who was a great tenor player. Really a kind man. The whole band was great.
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I just lucked into a lot of good people man. In my life and through friends, and in the music, that really embraced me and took care of me. I'm a lucky guy.
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Remember, you have only one ride through life so give it all you got and enjoy the ride.
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I had a great year with Bob Mintzer [at Laguardia School of Arts]. Bob is great. We could have just brought the clarinet or dealt with classical stuff, or brought the flute or just dealt with comp and arranging... what a great teacher.
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Challenges ONLY make you STRONGER!!!
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Letting people share their gifts and strengths is real love.
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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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When you believe, the impossible becomes possible. What you believe will become what is true. Your optimism today will determine your level of success tomorrow. Don’t look at your challenges look up and look out into the future. Don’t focus on your circumstances. Focus on the right beliefs that will help you build your success.
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I was occasionally getting calls for some things. But I would say, 22 to 29 was a lot of scuffling. Hoping to get called for bad wedding gigs and I did do an off-Broadway show for about 15 months.
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I had a really nice association with Richie DeRosa, a great musician, a great drummer and composer and arranger. And I had a number of classes with him.
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Sometimes you think Okay, well I'm going to play my horn, and I'm going to study Charlie Bird Parker solos or [John Coltrain] or whatever. But as [Phil Wood] said to me, Man, Bird listened to everything.
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I definitely had some moments, where, Wow, these were some hard chords on some gig.
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When you experience resistance, you find the lessons that you are meant to learn
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You fuel your life with trust and love instead of fear and doubt.
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Pretty fortunate that with the exception of two months when I was 23, that I worked in a law office pushing paper around. I was always able to eke out a living somehow. So I'm blessed.
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I was finishing up at High School of Performing Arts and finally, by the end of junior year and start of senior year, made some progress as a 16 year-old classical saxophone player. But not really... not like how the legit cats do. But I love the [Jacques] Ibert, love [Alexander] Glazunov, love the [Paul] Creston.
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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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I was also sitting in from the middle of senior year of high school at Sweet Basil, it was a great club in New York.
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