Today we’d like to introduce you to Jason Sagebiel.
Hi Jason, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Absolutely, I’m happy to share. I never intended to become a musician or a teacher. But the universe had other plans. Every time I was away from music, some event forced me back into it.
My musical journey began when I was a 13. I contracted a rare childhood disease, which left me sick for sometime. This particular disease lasts usually only a few weeks. The school doctor misdiagnosed me and put me on medications that I should not have been on, and that I had a reaction to. This left me unable to fight off the infection. As such, I ended up in a study for children with rare diseases at the National Institutes of Health. I was sick for over 18 months.
In order to get my mind off of being sick, my parents got me enrolled into guitar lessons through our church. Music had become my escape, a channel for self expression, and a source of healing.
Then it came time for going to college. While I didn’t have aspirations to become a musician, I did get a half academic scholarship, and a half music scholarship, which together paid for my college tuition. I went off to get my music degree at Loyola New Orleans, as being a music major was the only way to pay for school.
While in music school, my younger sister joined the Marine Corps. And as a man, I laughed, how do not join after your little sister did? So I signed up in 1999. Since I had already done two years of college, I joined the reserves instead of active duty. (Incidentally, my youngest sister eventaully joined too, so all three of us are Marines.)
My scholarships were fixed, but tuition went up every year. So I needed to work to pay my way through school. My platoon commander was a training director for the Department of Energy, and through that connection I applied and got the job to do security for the nuclear sites, and petroleum reserves at the DOE.
I was at the Central Training Academy in Albuquerque when 9/11 happened. My reserve days were quickly over, and I soon found myself on active duty doing a lot of training preparing for what would come.
Almost two years later, I was on the ground in Iraq, serving as a Scout-Sniper in the opening festivities of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
During that time I had two experiences that would forever shape my life.
First, despite the war, I befriended the locals and actually studied their music and art. I now play the Iraqi oud. That’s a testament to the power of music transcending cultures and building human connections. Ali, Ahmed, and Drees became my closest Iraqi friends there. And the oud maker Hisham al-Hasham built his first oud in many years for me, because he, as many other Iraqis were exiled to Jordan.
Second, I suffered a brain injury. I was hit in the head with a brick during a fight in which my team of 4 was compromised and surrounded by nearly 800. That fractured my skull, but I refused to go to Germany for treatment so I could continue to work. My team conducted the raid on the King of Spades, the minister of defense, days later. After the brick, I went through two explosions. These combined injuries left me with a traumatic brain injury that debilitated me for years.
Without too much detail, the TBI forced me to relearn how to do everything as an adult. I relearned to talk, to walk, to concentrate. And I relearned music, too. In fact, music is what got me through that time – a second testament to the healing power of music in my life.
Throughout this ordeal, I became fascinated with the learning process, and human learning is now my expertise. My therapist at the VA pointed me to where I could find the research, and I consumed every study I could read on plasticity, forming memories, habits, skills, and on anything I could find that would help me to become successful again.
While I was recovering from my injuries, I could not hold a steady job. But teaching music privately allowed me to reschedule students if I was having a day with worse symptoms. And as I taught, I started to apply the science and psychology of learning that I had adapted from my own recovery – and it worked. It worked even more than I could have ever expected.
The referrals started to pour in, and I could no longer keep up with the demand. I soon started to hire other teachers to help, and my first music school was born.
As that school grew, I took on a partner who turned out to be dishonest. He was collecting the money while I was paying the bills. We went through a business divorce, and I had to start over with nothing. He had taken the websites, the bank accounts, the grand piano, and left me with an empty space and the rent bill.
So I started over again. Without being constrained by a business partner, I had nothing in the way of realizing my vision. Over the years, we grew much, and had two locations in New York City. We had a thriving community, a dedicated staff, and amazing students – including Emmy Award winners, broadway performers, and even Saturday Night Live cast members – who had all come to work with our revolutionary program because of the results our students were seeing.
Sage Music was in an amazing place, and I felt it was time to start scaling the business when the pandemic happened. We lost 40% of our clients overnight, and 60% over the next two months.
We were not able to operate in person, so we turned our school into a virtual school within 36 hours of the pandemic shutdown. I was not happy, because I wanted it done in 24!
The school ran well online for the next year, until NYC started to reopen. However, due to the legal restrictions in NYC, were were labeled a high risk activity, and could not open with the rest of the city.
While we were legally blocked from operating, we were still legally required to pay our rent! It was an unteneble situation. To survive, we broke our lease and walked away from hundreds of thousands of dollars in lease hold improvements. It pains me to this day that I write a check every month for the construction loans on a magnificent school that no longer exists. But I and we are resilient, and so we moved on.
We knew we needed to be somewhere more friendly to business. We researched, and landed on San Antonio for a lot of great reasons. We loaded up an 18 wheeler, drove across the country, and moved the school and our office staff to San Antonio in 2021. We operated out of a co-working space for a year while we were closing on a beautiful landmark building in the heart of town. We are conveniently location in Tobin Hill, near San Antonio College, right north of downtown, within a few blocks of I-35, I-10, and Hwy 281, so it is quite easy to get to us from all over the city. We did this because we aren’t looking to target a specific part of town, but are looking for students all over San Antonio, of any age, who want to do music and want to do it well,
The school is now growing again, and we are almost back to our pre-pandemic success, just a little more to go. We’ve even reopened our school in NYC in a new space. We are so excited that it is back, even if our new New York space feels a little humble compared to our amazing pre-pandemic facilities.
Now, we are working on doing the two things that we do best: helping our students achieve their best in music and in life with proven learning strategies that people really can’t get anywhere else; and secondly, building community around art, learning, and culture.
The school has a gorgeous community space, and we will soon have a coffee bar in place, too. We can’t wait for that to open to continue growing and helping people learn, connect, and celebrate in community, with live music and more.
Our biggest goal is to change the education industry for the better. We’ve got the tools to do it.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I didn’t know this question was coming, but you’ll find most of the challenges in my last answer. Those were recovering from a rare childhood disease, a war, and a brain injury. Making it through a business partner who stole, being shut down during the pandemic, an interstate move, and walking away from hundreds of thousands of dollars on lease hold improvements.
There are two other big struggles I did not mention, including a multinational lawsuit, and big delays in opening our San Antonio school.
First, we ended up in litigation, a multinational corporation tried to block us from renewing our trademark. We successfully defended and won our case in front of the USPTO, preserving our TradeMarks and ServiceMarks. I took over a year of litigation, and I don’t want to say how much time, effort, and money to win that case. But we did, and so we are still proudly called Sage Music®.
When we got to San Antonio and bought the landmark building, we had one person oppose our plans – despite the fact that we hired the former head of the Historic & Design Review Commission to be our architect, because we do everything above board and wanted to be sure that were within the guidelines.
Due to this person’s opposition letter, we got blocked by the Historic Committe. We eventually won our case at the HDRC with overwhelming community support, and a unanimous decision at the HDRC. We proceeded with our construction, but were significantly behind schedule.
Our renovations were supposed to be about 12 weeks, but with the opposition, and our contractor juggling too many contracts, our construction took well over a year. The result was that we had no income for about two years.
It was quite tough to be paying a mortgage on a landmark building and paying 25 staff without having any income! I had made a goal not to lay anyone off during covid, and we succeded in that, and so I made the same goal here. I sold my house and moved into the school during that time to keep my people employed. They had all been so dedicated to me, to the school, and believed in our mission, it was the least I could do for them. I managed to keep everyone employed for a year. Unfortunately, I did have to lay off two employees after a year. I hate very much that this happened.
We are now through the toughest of those times, yet still dedicated to our mission and moving forward with conviction.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Aside from the business, I was a serious performer in New York City. I worked as a guitarist, and primarily as a conductor. I was also the director of an orchestra up until Covid.
My personal interest is in the creation and performance of new art music. Beethoven wrote art music, and he had a big audience during his time, but who are the art music performers and composers of today?
That is who I am interested in finding, performing, and promoting.
As part of that journey, I have commissioned and performed more than 30 world premieres. The composers of this music include Grammy and Emmy award winners, members of Nine Inch Nails, the B52s, the Metropolitan Opera, the Phillip Glass ensemble, producers at EMI and more. I love good music, no matter the genre.
I’m quite proud of those achievements, and that is the sort of energy that I want to build here in San Antonio, too. There are a lot of cover bands and historical music – but there is a lot of room for what is fresh and new. I want to bring that.
We built a concert stage in our community space at Sage Music, and I am looking to fill that with creative, original music. One of our goals is to get that venue built and running, so we can build even more community around great art, great music, and great learning. Excellence does not come from a vacuum. You need the community to share, to thrive, and to inspire.
I should mention at somepoint, that I am lucky to have a compelling story. Even though getting here was not easy! Because of that, there are two books that have been written in part about me. Jon Pieslak’s Sound Targets, and Martin Daughtry’s Listening to War. Both are about my time as a Marine Corps Scount-Sniper in Iraq while doing music with the local at the same time. I’m proud that I’ve done things that are interesting enough that others have taken notice.
Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
Growing up I was reserved, introspective. Perhaps a little awkward, and self-conscious. That’s because I had not yet learned my own value and strengths. That took time.
I was interested in everything, really. I have always had a fascination with the world.
I was never the best at anything, but I was always really good at a lot of things. And for that reason, I have always felt that our current society was not the best fit for me. I see myself as a generalist in a world of specialization, and that has always been the case, even when I was young. It’s one of the things that makes me good at running a business, in that I have to be that generalist.
As a kid I rode bikes, played sports – mostly running and swimming, because I was not good at sports with balls. I dabbled in language, music, art, philosophy, science. All that continues today – give me something to learn or create, and I’m interested. Perhaps that’s why I’m so happy to work in education and in the arts.
Pricing:
- Services start around $207 per month, which includes 4 private music lessons and 4 weekly group classes using our proven Arpeggio® learning system
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sagemusic.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sagemusicco/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SageMusicCo/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/3260112/
- Twitter: https://x.com/SageMusicCo/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/sagemusicco
