Lester Koenig
American screenwriter and music industry executive
Lester Koenig (December 3, 1917 – November 21, 1977) was an American screenwriter, film producer, and founder of the jazz record label Contemporary Records.
Biography
Koenig was born to a Jewish family in New York City, the son of Minna (Harlib) and Morris Koenig. His father was a judge; his brother was advertising executive Julian Koenig. As a child, he collected records and was introduced to the record producing business by John H. Hammond who served as his mentor. He attended Dartmouth College where he was friends with Budd Schulberg, son of B.P. Schulberg, the head of production at Paramount film studios. After Dartmouth, he attended Yale Law School but was forced to drop out after his father's death. In 1936, he then went to work for Martin Block on the Make Believe Ballroom radio show at Milton H. Biow's WNEW in New York City. In 1937, B.P. Schulberg offered him a job as a writer at Paramount Studios and he moved to Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, leveraging his experience with John Hammond, he was hired by David Stuart and his wife, Marili Morden – the owners of the Jazz Man Record Shop which was adjacent to Paramount Studios – to produce some records under Stuart's Jazz Man Records label. In 1941, Koenig recorded Lu Watters which he followed on with Bob Scobey and Turk Murphy.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1691388. VIAF identifies the subject as 3749149296155180670006. The Library of Congress control number is n81067280. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1917, 1977, 1936 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lester Koenig” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.