Jon Oxford
Adjunct Music Instructor: Guitar
Jon Oxford is a Florida native who has worked as a performer, composer, ensemble leader, and educator for more than 20 years. He spent eight years (2003-2011) with the U.S. Army Band, where he was stationed at Camp Zama, Sagamihara, Japan, and with the NATO Jazz Orchestra in Mons, Belgium.
After his time with the military, he returned to Florida, where he began his formal collegiate musical training at Eastern Florida State College, earning an Associate in Arts degree, before studying Jazz Performance and Composition and earning a Bachelor of Music at the University of Central Florida. While earning a Master of Music degree at the University of South Florida, Oxford studied composition under Chuck Owen, directed a variety of jazz ensembles, assisted in teaching jazz history, and was a featured composer on the USF Jazz Studies performance tour in Germany. His secondary area of interest at USF was studying the cooperative brain functions of improvising musicians, outlined in his research proposal Achieving Inter-Brain Synchronization Amongst Multiple, Cooperative Improvisers.
Oxford has performed across five continents with marching bands, concert bands, big bands, string orchestras, pit orchestras, rock groups, fusion groups, and combinations of them all. He has performed at the Yokohama Pacifico and Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan concert halls, as well as various Japanese festivals from Sapporo to Hiroshima. He’s filmed live television performances in Manila, Philippines and performed with rock groups in Cairns, Australia.
In Europe, Jon wrote and performed with groups of varied sizes in the continent’s many festivals: Doudou Fest (Mons, Belgium); the Nice Jazz Festival (Nice, France); Wiggan Jazz Festival (Wiggan, England); Tabasalu and Tallin Jazz Festivals (Estonia); the A to JazZ Festival (Sophia, Bulgaria); the WORLD Jazz Festival (Riga,Latvia), amongst many others. He has led groups from the grandiose Château de Versailles in France to the tiny town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the German Alps, and across the whole of Europe.
Locally, Oxford maintains a regular performance schedule across the state, performing with touring Broadway shows, such as Matilda, Motown, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical; and other touring acts, such as Mary Wilson (The Supremes), Don Rickles’ Big Band, Bernadette Peters, Donny Most (Happy Days), Chris Mann (Phantom of the Opera, and The Voice winner), the Roy Orbison Hologram Tour, Il Divo, Beverly Lee (The Shirelles) and Cozi Zuehlsdorff (Dolphin Tale movies).
Throughout this time, Oxford has also kept a regular studio of more than 40 students teaching performance on guitar, bass, piano, banjo, and ukulele; composition, music theory, and improvisation. He is also commissioned as a composer, arranger, and copyist for numerous projects from musicals to chamber ensembles.
He has been married since 2003 and has three children, all adopted through Florida’s foster system. He loves the writings of Charles Dickens, the French language, baking homemade bread, and RPG video games.