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Biography
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.
Scholars disagree over how to best define jazz. In his book, 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, but is rather a highly organized and (hopefully) spontaneous set of theme and variations." Rock and roll supplanted jazz as popular music in the 1950s, and by the time Schoenberg discovered it, many of jazz's greatest practitioners had fallen out of the spotlight and were often struggling to find gigs. Subsequently, 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. It was in this way that Schoenberg received informal piano lessons from master jazz pianists Teddy Wilson 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.