Robin, as he was always known, was born in Washington, D.C., on December 13, 1930, to Frank and Eugenia Frost. Our father, Frank Sr., was a retired business executive and philanthropist; he was also a skilled violist, talented enough to play Beethoven sonatas with members of the San Francisco Symphony. Robin was beginning to pick out tunes on the piano at four years old, and at six he began formal instruction.
The family migrated to Palo Alto, where he graduated from Palo Alto High in 1948. He was already an accomplished classical pianist and a talented jazz trumpet player. In 1948 he began practicing regularly with a young Dixieland garage band in the early days of the Dixieland revival. Musician friends of the family urged our mother to encourage his interest in composition, and he had begun conservatory study when he was diverted by a hurried marriage to his first wife, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
During the Korean War, Robin served in the Navy. On discharge in 1953, he moved to Santa Barbara with young son Peter — but no wife. He now resumed composition study with Eric Zeisl, an Austrian refugee composer who had been lured to Hollywood. Zeisl rejected the atonal experimenters in favor of an older, soulful romanticism with lush, sweeping chords –– Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Ravel –– which find echoes in Robin’s work.