The Critics Speak

Jon’s story begins in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jon’s brother (Jay Gold) was deeply involved in music and was General Manager of Mushroom Records who was host label to the pop group Heart. Jay instilled a love of blues and jazz onto his brother and Jon went on to take up piano. His first performances were with the Palo Alto School District Jazz band where he was selected to perform with Dizzy Gillespie for a special on KQED-TV in San Francisco. Jon began studies and performing locally with tenor sax giant Joe Henderson and was dubbed “Little McCoy” by noted critic Herb Wong of the SF Chronicle.

While in college he developed an interest in winemaking. While busy as a musician, he decided to attend college at UC Santa Cruz in chemistry with the hoped of becoming a winemaker. 

While at Santa Cruz, Jon developed a love for Latin music working with a number of salsa, Latin and Brazilian groups. However, he developed a special love for the jazz-influenced music of Brazil.

As a side note, Jon, while a graduate student at Cornell Univ. became the first person to melt a diamond. This was a serendipitous accident that garnered attention both in the scientific world and mainstream press.

Upon finishing his PhD, Jon felt like he needed to follow his heart and live and work in Rio de Janeiro. He was offered a visiting professor fellowship by the Brazilian Federal Government and taught at PUC-Rio. 

This afforded Jon the opportunity to meet and work with some of the greatest names in Brazil: A.C. Jobim and Hermeto Pascoal among others. He did shows at the invitation of the US Embassy and performed on Brazilian national TV shows. He did considerable work with the multi-instrumentalist Carlos Malta having performed in the major venues in Rio.

After marrying, Jon decided to move back to the US settling about an hour from NYC. He has since released several albums featuring multi-award winning players such as Dave Lieberman, Zach Broch, Jon Irabagon, Howard Levy, Tom “Bones” Malone and Harvie S amongst others. His last album “Bossa of Possibility” (BluJazz Records) received 4.5 stars from Downbeat magazine.

Jon is also currently working on film and TV scoring and has just recorded a piece with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra co-produced with Grammy award winning Pablo Aslan.