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If I could have picked two guys on the planet, to have some exposure to at that age, those were the two right guys [Phil Woods and Charles McPherson].

Jon Gordon

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Jon Gordon
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: January 20
Businessperson
Consultant
Writer
Right
Picked
Woods
Planet
Planets
Guys
Guy
Phil
Age
Charles
Two
Exposure

More quotes by Jon Gordon

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Anyone who attempts to build great things will face challenges.
Jon Gordon
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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.
Jon Gordon
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I made some nice associations. Ben Perowsky and Kevin Hays... Bill Mobley and Pete McGuinness. A lot of talented people.
Jon Gordon
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Earlier that year [1996], Ronnie Scott came to Visiones when I was playing with Maria and he hired me to come and play in his club in London, which I was gratified by. That allowed me to make some more connections.
Jon Gordon
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I was really falling in love with jazz and dedicating myself in that direction.
Jon Gordon
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Aesthetically, I love the whole history of the music.
Jon Gordon
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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.
Jon Gordon
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Ernie Hayes, Jimmy Lewis, and either Belton Evans or Khalil Mahdi on drums [were in Sweet Basil]. All those guys really took care of me.
Jon Gordon
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You hear about the struggles with substances and all that, but [Phil Wood] was a really a great guy. This was a great man.
Jon Gordon
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The best legacy you could leave is not some building that is names after you or a piece of jewelry but rather a world that has been impacted and touched by your presence, your joy, and your positive actions.
Jon Gordon
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Larry [ Laurenzano] said to me one day near the end of junior high, Jon, are you Jewish? I said, No. And he said, Well neither am I. I'm not sure of Caesar DiMauro, but he teaches at the JCC and I got you a scholarship there.
Jon Gordon
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The Monk competition did open some doors. And I was thankful for that.
Jon Gordon
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I'm reaching a certain level [at school] that I had been aspiring to with all these incredibly advanced classical peers around me that I had been trying to be able to hang with them a little bit.
Jon Gordon
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Phil [Wood] was very passionate. Very committed. He felt very blessed that the people that cared about him and took him aside... if he was out of line or drinking too much, being too surly.
Jon Gordon
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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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A lot of musicians have said things to me like, Music saved my life. And I'm standing on the shoulders of dozens of people that you've never heard of that were like angels for me that came out of the woodwork. And that's really the case for me. I had so many people that did those kinds of things for me.
Jon Gordon
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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.
Jon Gordon
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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.
Jon Gordon
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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.
Jon Gordon
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We often have to lose what we thought we wanted to find what God wants for us
Jon Gordon