Early Life
Born Allan Bentley Gumbs in Harlem, Onaje grew up in St. Albans, Queens, and started playing piano at age 7. Henry Mancini was one of his earliest and greatest influences from watching the TV shows "Peter Gunn" and "Mr Lucky" at age 8. Later, he studied at the Music and Art High School in Manhattan and was introduced by a classmate, Carl "Skip" Kirkland, to his father Leroy Kirkland, who had played with the Erskine Hawkins band, and who would come to mentor Onaje. During this time, he was playing in a Latin band, a big band and playing piano duets, and was also listening to records made by Motown and Blue Note, developing an interest in R&B that would influence his musical career as strongly as the straight-ahead jazz of Horace Silver, Dizzy Gillespie, Lalo Schifrin, Gil Evans, Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner and John Coltrane. Onaje went on to study classical piano, composition, arranging and graduated with a degree in Education at the State University of New York at Fredonia in upstate New York.
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