Loren Schoenberg

Loren Schoenberg
Photo by Lynn Redmile
Background information
Born	(1958-07-23)July 23, 1958 Fair Lawn, New Jersey, U.S.
Genres	Jazz
Occupation(s)	Musician, critic, educator
Instruments	Saxophone
Years active	1970s–present
Website	www.lorenschoenberg.com

Loren Schoenberg (born July 23, 1958 in Fair Lawn, New Jersey) is a tenor saxophonist, conductor, author, educator, and jazz historian. He has won two Grammy Awards for Best Album Notes. He is the founding director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.

In the late 1970s he played professionally with alumni of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands. In 1980 he formed his own big band, which in 1985 became the last Benny Goodman orchestra.

Schoenberg was born July 23, 1958, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, where he attended Fair Lawn High School. His father worked for the New York Telephone Company. His mother, a children's librarian, began teaching him the piano when he was four and then found a neighborhood piano teacher to take her son beyond simple scales. Schoenberg's love of old films led him to Benny Goodman, and his love of Goodman's music made Schoenberg a jazz fan in the early 1970s.

The young aficionado was able to watch the greats perform up close and personal in humble venues as nearby as Hackensack, New Jersey, talking to them afterwards and occasionally invited to demonstrate his own skills for his idols, who were impressed that someone as young as Schoenberg was still interested in the genre. Indeed, the very word "jazz" itself had seldom graced their aged ears since Woodstock.

It was in this way that Schoenberg received informal piano lessons from master jazz pianists Teddy Wilson, Paul Shaffer and Hank Jones. In 1972, Teddy Wilson brought his young protégé to a jazz performance at the Waldorf Astoria where Schoenberg first met Benny Goodman.

That same year, Schoenberg began volunteering at the now-defunct Jazz Museum in New York City, meeting more jazz musicians and growing involved in the scene. It was while volunteering that Schoenberg, at the urging of cornetist Ruby Braff, met respected piano and music theory teacher Sanford Gold, who did a great deal to supplement Schoenberg's musical foundations with lessons on piano and musical theory.

Also at the Jazz Museum, the fifteen-year-old met Benny Goodman again, while working on the Museum's Goodman exhibit.

At 15, he began to teach himself how to play the saxophone, inspired by jazz saxophonist Lester Young. In 1976, his piano lessons with Sanford Gold made it possible for Schoenberg to enter the Manhattan School of Music.