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Phil [Wood] said to me in the car going back, he said, Look man, you better know why you're playing this music. Because I've known too many who lived and died for it. And if you're not trying to change the world, I'm not interested.

Jon Gordon

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Jon Gordon
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: January 20
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More quotes by Jon Gordon

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When you experience resistance, you find the lessons that you are meant to learn
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All we can do is go about our work. But we can have a goal. We can have a dream.
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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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Connection to the music and the history was very powerful to me. I think that's what I feel the most blessed about.
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Another classical music teacher from Performing Arts that I've stayed in contact with is Jonathan Strasser.
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I had made a couple of records in Europe. One as a leader, and one as a sideman before that. It was what it was. I started to work with Maria Schneider around that period and some other people, I started to get called to sub at the Vanguard in my mid-20s.
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The goal is not to be better than anyone else but rather be better than you were yesterday.
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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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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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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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I made some nice associations. Ben Perowsky and Kevin Hays... Bill Mobley and Pete McGuinness. A lot of talented people.
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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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We had been thrown out of a couple of places that we had lived in when I was a kid and all the family photos and records and toys were long since gone. But I think somebody had given us a couple of records.
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Alan [Ferber] is a great trombonist and composer. I'm thankful that I got some associations like that through peers and former students. That's kind of what it is.
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[Manhattan School Of Music] were kind of just getting the jazz program up and going when I first started there. I was 17 in September of 1984 when I started there.
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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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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.
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I feel very similarly. I didn't have necessarily the same exact kind of dynamic, but that means a lot when people are like that with you. Especially people like that. And I think [Phil Wood] felt a certain responsibility .
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When I was a kid, I always saw these pictures of a man called Bob Gordon with a baritone saxophone, who I understood was my father. Turns out he wasn't. He was my mother's first husband.
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