Dr. Jonathan Saraga

My name is Jonathan Saraga and I'm a GRAMMY®-winning trumpeter, flugelhornist, composer, arranger, educator and Doctor of Musical Arts based out of New York City.

I have been working as a professional musician for 2 decades as well as a private teacher, ensemble director, clinician and lecturer within public school, private school, charter school, and university environments for the past 10 years. I appear on 30+ studio albums, in 250+ YouTube videos, and have engaged with audiences in over 500 cities, nearly 70 countries and just short of 100 different universities world-wide. I have 25+ years of musical training, including 9 within conservatory settings, and 6 within intensive program environments.

I hold 3 Trumpet Performance/Jazz Studies degrees and have been recognized 35 times in the form competitive selections from 25 national and international organizations, featuring 9 composition competition placements, 9 grant/commission receipts, 6 residency invitations/placements, 4 trumpet competition placements, 4 workshop invitations and 3 educational conference invitations. I have performed throughout Canada, the Caribbean, Central America, Europe, Asia and the U.S. via multiple national tours, and have been employed by dozens of GRAMMY®-nominated and/or winning artists.

Since 2010, I have been teaching all-level/all-age music playing and appreciation courses for a host of New York City-based organizations, including the Afro-Latin Jazz Academy, The Gramercy Brass Orchestra of New York, New York Ensemble Classes, the Lyceum Kennedy International School, Jubilee Enrichment Programs, Jazz Empowers and the New York Jazz Academy. I also served for 6 semesters as a Graduate Part-Time Instructor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I taught multiple playing ensembles as well as three semesters of a 100+ student History of Jazz lecture class for non-majors. Finally, my private studio has been active since 2011 and has garnered 5-Star ratings on Yelp (47 Reviews) and Google (21 Reviews), as well as 2 “People Love us on Yelp" awards, a Lessons.com "Top Pro" award, a “Best of Tuturs.com” award and a "We're Highly Recommended by Locals on Alignable" award.

I teach out of my home apartment studio on the upper east side, complete with weighted 88-key digital piano, Bose high quality speakers, audio and video recording equipment, as well as musical media and tablature spanning many musical genres, cultures and time periods. I specialize in the following broad areas of musical study: General Music, Composition, Arranging, Ear Training, Music History (includes classical, jazz, and world musics), Music Theory, Sight Reading, and Songwriting, as well as in the following instruments: Trumpet, Flugelhorn, and Piano/Keyboards.

I began teaching private lessons after completing my Master of Music degree in 2011, and since then, through working as a music teacher for 6 New-York-area based music intensive programs, as well as Departmental Assistant, Teaching Assistant, and/or Graduate Part-Time Instructor at 3 universities, I’ve come to understand that serving as an educator, teacher and mentor is not only a passion, but it's also part of my purpose. The core of my mission as an educator is to not only guide students toward realizing their own potentials as musicians, artists and complete human beings, but also to encourage and enable them to visualize their own growth and potential. To do that, I aim to construct learning environments which nurture self-discovery through guidance, as opposed to environments which dictate how students should develop and/or perceive material.

My approach to the teaching of music is influenced by 20 years of immersion within jazz-academia, adapting and synthesizing wisdom and knowledge shared by master teaching artists. Throughout my 6 semesters of teaching for the Thompson Jazz Studies program at the University of Colorado Boulder, I became passionate about creative music-education reform, often discussing the philosophies of teaching jazz and creative music with educators and students alike. One of my dissertation projects featured the work of jazz-education visionary, Dr. Ed Sarath, and his book, "Improvisation, Creativity and Consciousness: Jazz as an Integral Template for Music, Education, and Society". It inspires my philosophy that the entirety of a students experience in a creative music program should be holistic, whereby courses not only include elements of performance pedagogy, artistic development, and socio-cultural engagement, but that they also interact with each other, creating a curriculum that breaths and evolves.