Neil Sedaka's private concert for Juxtaposition

Early life: Juilliard and the Brill Building
Neil Sedaka was born in Brooklyn. His father, Mordechai “Mac” Sedaka, was a taxi driver of Lebanese Jewish descent. Sedaka’s paternal grandparents came to the United States from Istanbul in 1910. Sedaka’s mother, Eleanor (née Appel), was an Ashkenazi Jew of Polish and Russian descent. He grew up in Brighton Beach. His father’s cousin, Rachel Gorman (née Cohen), daughter of Isaac Cohen and Calo Cohen (née Sedaca or Sedaka), was married to Morris Gorman (né Garmezano; paternal uncle to singer Eydie Gormé).

Sedaka 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 piano. 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 had wanted him to become a classical pianist like his contemporary Van Cliburn, and Sedaka continued to show fondness for (and capacity to play) classical music throughout his life.

At the same time, to his mother’s dismay, Sedaka was discovering pop music; his mother eventually acquiesced when Sedaka received a five-figure royalty check for his hit “Calendar Girl“ in 1961. 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 Brill Building‘s composers.

Sedaka and Greenfield wrote songs together throughout much of their young lives. Before rock and roll became popular, Sedaka and Greenfield found inspiration from show tunes. When Sedaka became a major teen pop star, the pair continued writing hits for Sedaka and numerous other artists. When the Beatles and the British Invasion took American music in a different direction, Sedaka was left without a recording career. In the early 1970s, he decided a major change in his life was necessary and moved his family to the United Kingdom. Sedaka and Greenfield mutually agreed to end their partnership with “Our Last Song Together”. Sedaka began a new composing partnership with lyricist Phil Cody.

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