Neil Sedaka - Early Life: Juilliard and The Brill Building

Early Life: Juilliard and The Brill Building

Sedaka was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Mac Sedaka, was a taxi driver and a Sephardic Jew of Turkish descent . ("Sedaka" and "Sedacca" are variants of tzedaka, which translates in both Hebrew and Arabic as the word charity). Sedaka's mother, Eleanor (née Appel), is an Ashkenazi Jew of Polish-Russian descent. He grew up in the then-heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, which lies on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Sedaka is a cousin of singer Eydie Gormé.

He demonstrated musical aptitude in his second-grade choral class, and when his teacher sent a note home suggesting he take piano lessons, his mother took a part-time job in an Abraham & Straus department store for six months to pay for a second-hand upright. In 1947, he auditioned successfully for a piano scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music's Preparatory Division for Children, which he attended on Saturdays. His mother wanted him to become a renowned classical pianist such as the contemporary of the day, Van Cliburn, but Sedaka was discovering pop music. When Sedaka was 13, a neighbor heard him playing and introduced him to her 16-year-old son, Howard Greenfield, an aspiring poet and lyricist. They became two of the legendary Brill Building's composers.

Sedaka and Greenfield wrote songs together throughout much of their young lives, with Sedaka going on to being a major teen pop star and the pair also writing hits for a litany of other artists as well as for Sedaka's own career. However, when The Beatles and the British Invasion took American music in a different direction, Sedaka was left without a recording career and decided a major change in his life was necessary, moving his family to Britain in the early 1970s. Sedaka and Greenfield mutually agreed that their partnership was at an end with "Our Last Song Together". Sedaka began a new composing partnership with lyricist Phil Cody, who was born and raised in Pleasantville, NY. After Sedaka returned to the US, however, the Sedaka-Greenfield team eventually reunited and continued until Greenfield's death in 1986.