Loren Schoenberg

Who is Loren Schoenberg?

Loren Schoenberg is a jazz historian, writer of liner notes, and tenor saxophonist. He began playing tenor saxophone in 1974 and by the late 1970s he was playing professionally with Benny Goodman. In 1981 he formed his own band, his music might be most associated with the swing.

He is a co-winner of the Grammy Award for Best Album Notes.

Loren Schoenberg told John Brown in an interview found on The Jazz Museum in Harlem's website.

"Some people say to me, 'You should have been born fifty years earlier'…. Of course I would have grown up to the great music of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. And I'd have probably spent my life interviewing the widow of Scott Joplin!"

A historian by nature, Loren Schoenberg became a fixture in the jazz world with his encyclopedic knowledge about the genre and passion for preserving its past while making it eminently contemporary. Today, in addition to his work performing, conducting, writing, preaching and teaching, Schoenberg has been named Artistic Director of The Jazz Museum in Harlem.

Loren Schoenberg was born July 23, 1958 in Fairlawn, New Jersey. His father worked for the New York Telephone Company. His mother, a children's librarian, began teaching Loren the piano when he was three. A year later, she 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. Jazz's heyday as a popular music form was over by that point, and while Schoenberg was collecting classic 78 rpm records by jazz originators like Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and "Fats" Waller, most of his peers were busy listening to rock and roll and folk music.