Jon Gordon Quotes

The goal in life is to live young, have fun, and arrive at your final destination as late as possible, with a smile on your face.

Life and success are about what you choose to believe.

Negative thoughts are the nails that build a prison of failure.

Letting people share their gifts and strengths is real love.

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.

Dust on gold doesn't change the nature of gold.

Enthusiasm attracts more passengers and energizes them during the ride.

Connection to the music and the history was very powerful to me. I think that's what I feel the most blessed about.

I had pestered [Phil Wood] for a long time. He finally agreed to do it. And I was excited and nervous and he couldn't have been nicer or more supportive from the minute I got to his house.

Phil [Wood] was known for having a little bit of a gruff manner, but he was all heart.

I saw that [music] reflected in my mother when we listened to these records [of Bob Gordon]. And I felt it too.

I think [Phil Wood] didn't suffer fools gladly, but he loved supporting young people that loved the music.

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.

Definitely I had a lot of times where I was really hard on myself. Really frustrated. But I never felt like I had someplace else to go. Just had to stay here and deal with this.

I definitely had some moments, where, "Wow, these were some hard chords" on some gig.

I never got discouraged for long, but we all got our butts kicked musically.

All we can do is go about our work. But we can have a goal. We can have a dream.

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.

[Phil Wood] knew about wine. He knew about food. He knew about art. He knew about classical music. He was interested in things.

I got to talk to Mel Lewis a lot as a teenager. I think that's what really impacted me the most around that time.

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.

I was really falling in love with jazz and dedicating myself in that direction.

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.

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.

I went in [Sweet Basil band] and played with them, maybe half the gig for almost eight years or more.

I was studying with Joe Allard, which was great, as a saxophone student. Being able to study with Joe Allard was an incredible experience.

There were a lot of great things you could go and hear for very little money at the time [ '80s]. Mike Stern is still playing at the 55 Bar on Mondays or Wednesdays.

Hearing Sonny Rollins live... that was really amazing. There were so many things that really blew me away at that time [of schooling].

Joe Henderson, who I maybe, to me, if I had to pick one improviser in my life that I saw live that blew my mind most, especially as a teenager.

[Charles McPherson] was kind enough to go to a record gig of mine where we recorded a song of his.

I think we had a Ben Webster/Gerry Mulligan record... that might have been it. We only had a few records in the house.

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.

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].

Enthusiasm comes from the Greek word entheos, which means, "inspired" or "filled with the divine."

It's a complicated story [hoe I got into music ]. I actually wrote a book about it, titled For Sue.

Sense of community was really fostered by Larry Laurenzano, who was a great educator.

Particularly, in my situation, I needed a way out of where I was. So music was that.

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.

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.

I made some nice associations. Ben Perowsky and Kevin Hays... Bill Mobley and Pete McGuinness. A lot of talented people.

[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.

[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.

I never really had a classical saxophone set-up. I just had a middle of the road set up.

I took some comp for non-comp major classes with Giacomo Bracali and Ludmila Ulela, who was a really famous composition teacher.

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.

Justin Di Cioccio led a jazz program at Music and Art, but there was no jazz in Performing Arts. After they joined, it became Laguardia School of Arts.

The Monk competition did open some doors. And I was thankful for that.

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.

I've been thankful to work with some wonderful people and sort of combine forces with some folks that... like in recent years, working with Alan Ferber or his brother Mark who's a wonderful drummer.

The best thing you can do is just go and have fun with [competition].