Jon Gordon is an American author and speaker on the topics of leadership, culture, sales, and teamwork.
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.
Things dribbled in in dribs and drabs through my 20s. But it was a struggle.
[Larry Laurenzano] gave me a junior high school saxophone to take to high school, because I was always taking one of our school horns home to practice and I couldn't afford to buy one. He gave my friend, Tyrone, a tuba and he gave me a junior high saxophone for each of us to use at Performing Arts High School with. My audition piece was selections from Rocky. We were not sophisticated. But we had some spirit about it. We enjoyed it, and it was a way out.
[My mother] told me a little bit about the scene out there and I think, as a small child, I just always felt a connection to that history because my mother had described it to me.
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.
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].
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.
It's not easy to deal with the negativity in the world but it's something that's got to be done. Your success and life are so important that you must surround yourself with a positive support team.
I had a lot of bad habits in how I was playing the horn. And I slowly, in high school and college, started to recognize them and get them a little better. But it was not an overnight process, I'll say that.
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. "
I remember Art Blakey saying to me, "Just remember, we're blessed to do what we do. "
Every morning you have a choice. Are you going to be a positive thinker or a negative thinker? Positive thinking will energize you.
I just think that I associated music with something that was healing and transformative as a kid.
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'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.
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 saw a nice interview with Dave Binney recently. He was saying, "Man it was never easy. It's not like 'Oh wow, the good old days. ' What, when certain people couldn't vote?" There was more work for musicians in the '40s, '50s, '60s. But I don't think it was ever easy.
[Charlie Parker] was kind of a sponge and intrigued by it all. That's similar to what Phil [Woods] told me about Bird, too. Like he was into cooking. He was just into a lot of things. Yeah, it's about dealing with bebop and jazz and Trane [John Coltrain] and post-Trane and knowing the history. But you've got to live. You have to experience things. Know something in this world. So it was a very deep education about what it means to try and be an artist.
When I got to Performing Arts, within the first week, a few days, Bill Charlap walked in and couldn't read music but he's playing all these solos from Keith Emerson of ELP, and Rick Wakeman from Yes. Real impressive rock piano and keyboard things. And we had really, truly amazing young 13-14 year old classical players in our year who had been practicing six, eight hours a day for eight years. So it was like "Whoa. "
By the latter part of high school, by the middle of junior year in high school, Jay Rodriguez played me some Irakere records that that Paquito [D'Rivera] was on. And he also played me and our friend, Curtis Haywood, some Phil Woods records. And when I heard Phil, I just about lost my mind. I was playing the Charlie Parker Omnibook as part of my lessons. This was the '80s. There was no YouTube and all that. And we had three or four jazz records at that point.