Loren Schoenberg

Loren Schoenberg

Photo by Lynn Redmile
Background information
Born (1958-07-23)July 23, 1958
Fair Lawn, New Jersey
Genres Jazz
Occupation(s) Musician, critic
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 is a winner of two Grammy Award for Best Album Notes.[1] 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.[2]

Early years and education

Schoenberg was born July 23, 1958, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, where he attended Fair Lawn High School.[3] 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.

While at school, he changed his concentration from piano to saxophone. He got a job playing saxophone in Eddie Durham's jazz quartet. Playing with Durham, one of the original members of the Count Basie band, gave Schoenberg opportunities to meet and work with jazz musicians such as Al Casey, Sammy Price, Roy Eldridge, Jabbo Smith, Eddie Barefield, Jo Jones, and Panama Francis.

In 1979, he produced a Charlie Parker and Lester Young tribute at Carnegie Recital Hall, arranging the songs, gathering the musicians, and performing with them. The concert featured Howard McGhee, Joe Albany, Buddy Anderson, Dicky Wells, Eddie Bert, Herb Ellis and Mel Lewis among others.

Benny Goodman

In 1980, Schoenberg received an unexpected call from Benny Goodman. The clarinetist intended to donate his collection of historical jazz arrangements to the New York Public Libraryy. Schoenberg, known around the jazz world as a history buff and an expert on Goodman's music in particular, was the perfect choice to compile the archive and write the accompanying documents. Schoenberg left the Manhattan School of Music to work on the collection, which were to be divvied out to the library in yearly installments.

A few years after he began, Benny Goodman decided to stop donating his arrangements to the New York Public Library. He hired Schoenberg on as his assistant, however, and later, as his personal and business manager.

Benny Goodman died in 1986. His will stipulated that all his remaining jazz arrangements and recordings be donated to Yale University and his favorite back brace to Schoenberg. Schoenberg was chosen to appraise the Goodman Archives,. Yale later hired him to help curate the collection and to compile a nine-CD box set of unreleased recordings.

Loren Schoenberg Big Band

Schoenberg formed the Loren Schoenberg Big Band, a repertory group devoted to performing the more obscure classics of the '30s, '40s, and '50s, though it eventually performed new works as well. The band performed at major venues, including the Blue Note, Michael's Pub, and Carnegie Hall.

In 1984, the Loren Schoenberg Big Band released its first album, That's the Way It Goes, followed by Time Waits for No One (1987), Solid Ground (1988), Just A-Settin' and A-Rockin ' (1989), Manhattan Work Song (1992), and Out of This World (1999). Schoenberg recorded S'posin ' in 1990 with a quartet, and has recorded with other jazz musicians such as Benny Carter, John Lewis, and Jimmy Heath.

In 1985, Schoenberg's band formed an association with the New York Swing Dance Society, and began providing the accompaniment for the organization's dance events. Benny Goodman asked the band to perform with him on a 1985 PBS television special, Let's Dance Already, which turned out to be Goodman's last televised performance.

Directing and conducting

In 1986, Schoenberg joined the American Jazz Orchestra, where he remained until 1992, playing tenor sax and later following John Lewis as its musical director. He has also conducted the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. In 1988 and 1989, he conducted the West German Radio Orchestra for a series of concerts, performing the works of George Gershwin and Duke Ellington for audiences in Cologne. Also during that period, he led, with Mel Lewis, a band for third stream jazz musician Gunther Schuller in Japan. In 1993, he was musical director for the International Duke Ellington Conference. Pianist Bobby Short hired Schoenberg as his musical director and saxophonist in 1997, a position he retained until Short’s passing in 2005.

National Jazz Museum

Schoenberg is Founding Director and Senior Scholar of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.[4] In June 2003, Schoenberg and his National Jazz Museum in Harlem All-Stars band performed at the White House to raise awareness about the museum project. The band played with Herb Jeffries, a 92-year-old baritone singer and an original member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Writing

Schoenberg's writing on jazz has appeared in the New York Times, the Lester Young Reader, the Oxford Companion to Jazz, and Masters of the Jazz Saxophone. In the summer of 2002, his first book, the NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Jazz, was published, with an introduction by Wynton Marsalis.

Scholars disagree over how to define jazz. In the NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Jazz (2002), Schoenberg wrote: "What makes jazz music different from country, classical, rock, and other well-known genres is its basic malleability...The great majority of it is not, as many believe, spun out of the air as if from some ephemeral, phantom spider, but is rather a highly organized and (unfortunately) spontaneous set of theme and variations."

Schoenberg has won two Grammy Awards for his liner notes. In 1994, with Dan Morgenstern, he won a Grammy Award for Best Album Notes for the accompanying materials to Louis Armstrong: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1923–1934, a boxed set of rare and essential recordings. In 2005, he won a Grammy for Best Liner Notes for the Complete Columbia Recordings of Woody Herman and His Orchestra & Woodchoppers (1945–1947) for Mosaic Records.

Radio and TV

From 1982–1990, Schoenberg hosted a weekly radio show on WKCR, where he played old jazz recordings, interviewed musicians, produced documentary specials, and broadcast live performances. In 1984, he became a co-host of Jazz from the Archives, a radio show on WBGO run by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University.

In September 1998, Schoenberg participated in a television program filmed at the White House with President Clinton, featuring musicians Wynton Marsalis, Marian McPartland, Billy Taylor, and David Baker. He served as an adviser to the PBS documentary Jazz by Ken Burns. Also that year, he became host of a radio program on Sirius satellite radio.

Teaching

Schoenberg is on the faculty of Juilliard's Institute for Jazz Studies, and Jazz at Lincoln Center's Jazz 101 series. He has taught at the New School, the Manhattan School of Music, William Paterson University, SUNY/Purchase, the Essentially Ellington Band Director's Academy in Snowmass, Colorado, the Juilliard Evening School, and Long Island University. In addition, he has given lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Philharmonic. Schoenberg is the Program Director of the Jazz Aspen Snowmass Jazz Colony summer program.

Reception

Nat Hentoff has written in JazzTimes: "Loren Schoenberg is a first-class musician, arranger, leader, and a critic with a rare comprehensive perception in the tradition of the late Martin Williams".

The Encyclopedia of Popular Music says: "It is Schoenberg's chosen role as dedicated archivist, educator and energetic advocate for jazz that is his greatest contribution to the music that he loves".

"Mr. Schoenberg...knows exactly how to calibrate his orchestra," Peter Watrous wrote for the New York Times (July 14, 1994), after seeing the band perform at the Village Vanguard. "...The band crackled with energy and intelligence," Watrous added, "and never once raised its voice without reason."

Discography

With others

References

  1. ↑ All Music
  2. ↑ Down Beat Artist's Profile
  3. ↑ Parisi, Albert J. "Fond Memories of the 'King of Swing'", The New York Times, October 1, 1989. Accessed July 23, 2016. "'Everybody I knew as a kid was into rock bands and heavy-metal stuff, but it just didn't do anything for me,' said Mr. Schoenberg, a 31-year-old Fair Lawn native...Over the years, besides studying music at Fair Lawn High School, Mr. Schoenberg managed to enter what he described as the Goodman 'inner circle,' made up of musicians who had worked with the artist in his heyday."
  4. ↑ "Who We Are | National Jazz Museum in Harlem". jazzmuseuminharlem.org. Retrieved 20 October 2016.
  5. ↑ "Loren Schoenberg | Album Discography | AllMusic". AllMusic. Retrieved 20 October 2016.
  6. ↑ "Loren Schoenberg". www.lorenschoenberg.com. Retrieved 20 October 2016.
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