I was raised around music. My father, Lester Koenig, ran a jazz record company, which he founded in 1949 in Los Angeles, a year before I was born. He'd started it as a kind of a hobby. He had been working in the movie industry, as second in command (typically credited as associate producer, which meant a lot more then than it does now) on all of Willy Wyler's pictures ("The Best Years of Our Lives," "Roman Holiday," etc.) and as he was always interested in music, he made friends with many of the composers who worked on the pictures he worked on.

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One of the most dynamic and important musicians my father recorded when I was very young was the legendary New Orleans bandleader Kid Ory (Louis Armstrong's first job was playing with Ory). Ory played the trombone, and his band played at my parents' parties at our house and he made a big impression on me. Consequently, when I was three, the first instrument I wanted to play was the trombone (subliminally I must have been attracted to the tenor clef!). But I was too little, so my parents got me a ukulele when I was four and I graduated to the guitar when I was five. In those days, I played mostly folk songs and popular ballads. I took up the trumpet when I was nine (I was actually too little for that too and had to have it attached to a hook in the ceiling by a string or else the bell of the horn would end up aimed at the floor). I was being taught "legit," but on the sly I was copying Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown solos off records by ear. I don't quite remember what motivated me, but I had asked my mother (my parents were divorced by then) when I was in 7th grade if I could study the violin in school, but she said no because when she was a child, a neighbor friend's younger brother was studying the violin and she couldn't stand the sound of it. So that was the end of that.