Lenny Hambro - Musical Training

Musical Training

As a teenager, Hambro pestered his father for a trumpet, but it was his brother-in-law, Harold Segal (older sister Adelaide's husband), who introduced 15-year-old Hambro to woodwinds, giving him a soprano saxophone and introductory music lessons. (Harold Segal played both the tenor saxophone and clarinet semi-professionally with an Irish band for a time.) By all accounts, Hambro quickly eclipsed his brother-in-law, taking every music class in which he could enroll. As a high school student, Hambro took private lessons from Bill Sheiner, one of the leading music teachers and session musicians in New York City. Sheiner taught in a studio behind the Bronx Musical Mart at 174th Street and Southern Boulevard, between Lenny's school and home. (Stan Getz and future Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, were fellow students of Sheiner.) Sheiner played multiple instruments - clarinet, saxophone, flute, and oboe - and most of his students were trying to simultaneously learn two similar instruments. Sheiner employed two books that are still standard texts: The Universal Complete Saxophone Method, and Klosé Complete Clarinet Method. During this period, Sheiner, who had worked in Shep Fields' all-saxophone band, decided to build his own all-sax band with eight of his students. With Sheiner as frontman, and a drummer, pianist, and bassist, the band included both Lenny and Stan Getz as well as Sol Schlinger, Irving Frank, Red Press, Jerry Grosser, Stan Yuden and Alan Kimmel. The band worked up some arrangements and auditioned for Maria Kramer, who owned both the Lincoln and Edison hotels (both featured dance bands) but the WWII draft intervened and the band quicky disbanded. During his later high-school years, Hambro played alto sax, tenor sax, clarinet, and flute in an assortment of teen dance bands, including a summer in the Catskills, playing occasional gigs in the evenings, while working as a lifeguard during the day at a resort hotel pool. (Years later, Hambro would return to the Catskills, playing with Machito's Orchestra at the Concord Resort Hotel, and during another summer, had his own quintet in the lounge.)