A Quote by Jon Gordon
[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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[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.
When we first started playing shows, we were all 17. Everybody started somewhere. There were guys throwing shows in condemned houses and backyards just for the love of music and for the love of what bands were standing for.
I started out trying to play more straight-ahead jazz. I went to Berklee in the early '60s when it was a brand new school, and so there was no fusion music. There wasn't a lot of mixing together of different kinds of music at that time, so jazz was kind of pure jazz.
Justin [Di Cioccio] was [at Laguardia School of Arts]. He later took over at Manhattan. But I knew Justin through the McDonald's band, which at the time I was finishing high school and starting college, I got involved with. I was not that heavily involved with the school at MSM my first year there. I took a semester off to start my 2nd year. Took classes I felt like taking during my third semester, but by the start of my third year, September of '86, they began the undergraduate jazz program and I joined that program.
When I started going to school, I started getting used to things, like the language. After that, I started adapting to school, friends, and everything. It was really difficult, to start with, but I survived.
I bought my first dirt bike when I was 12, and I started racing motocross when I was 15 and started getting pretty successful. Then I started racing snowmobiles at 17 and decided I wanted to focus on that and see if I can make a career at it.
When I started singing, I was going to school. I remember some of the people in school singing, and they had a choir. I would just watch and listen. Finally I started at least attempting to try to do what they was doing. When I was younger, we started going to church. I can't say that we were always, you know, the most church-going people.
When I started music, I started out in Puerto Rico with classical music. But what really made me want to be a musician was jazz, and because I didn't grow up with jazz, I had to learn it from a very basic level. I had to go into the history and learn everything about the development of the music, all the players and all that stuff.
Well, I had started a program which is even longer running than this one in 1967 which was a jazz program called The Best of Jazz and that still goes out on Monday nights. That's been going for 33 years or something.
I played drums since I was 6 years old. And then I got into producing music when I was about 16 or 17. Somebody showed me FL Studios, the program. My beats were bad at first, but then eventually they started to get good.
I started working with Special Olympics when I was 17 years old. I'll never forget the first time I did it: I was at Weber State, and it was the summer before I started school. We have to get up in the morning and do this Special Olympics camp.
I would say I'm a musician first, actually. I started playing music when I was 10. Then I started designing, went to school, set up a proper business about 10 years ago - our anniversary coming up. But I've played music throughout and still am.
I was very lucky, because when I was at school, I had a great music teacher who would just take out these free-jazz records and play them for me. So it was in my early teens that I started to listen to jazz.
I always looked up to great actors and great films. A lot of my family would be like, 'Come on, you should get into these plays that are going on.' I'm like, 'Nah, nah, music's my thing.' I just fell into it. I moved to Atlanta, got with an agency out there, started doing little voiceover commercials, and it started getting kind of fun.
I started as a GED instructor, I created my own GED program, and I realized that a lot of young people that don’t do well academically. It’s not that they don’t have the competency to do it or the skill set to do it; it’s just that they weren’t motivated to learn. They weren’t interested in school, so I started just talking to students and just really going in on them like, “Yo, this is life or death.”
I'm not really an ideologue. I think I'm a person of common sense. I think more than anything else and I was a Democrat, I came from a place - you know, I lived in Manhattan. I started in Queens with my parents and then when I started doing a little better and better deals, I was able to get into Manhattan, I moved into Manhattan and in Manhattan you, you know, Republicans are not exactly flourishing. And so I started off as a Democrat like Ronald Reagan was also a Democrat.
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