FAQ'S

Alan’s biography says so little about his background before he was seven years old. Just out of curiosity, can you fill us in a bit?

Alan was born in a long-since closed and shuttered maternity hospital on East 83^rd Street in Manhattan, but his family lived in Whitestone, Queens at the time, having just migrated across the river the year before from the Southeast Bronx where both his parents were raised.  When he was three years old, the family moved again to Roosevelt, Long Island, now an infamous slum town and even then far from a haven for the wealthy.  He remembers, “We lived diagonally across the street from a bus yard and there was a lot of noise.” Soon the Seidler family was looking for something a little closer to both their relatives and the Postwar American Dream.

Two years later, having scraped together enough money to put down a deposit on a house in the Westchester suburb of New Rochelle, New York, the Seidlers settled there and Alan remained there until he finished high school and was accepted to Juilliard. We think the rest of the story pretty much speaks for itself in the bio (Alan Seidler 101), with the omission of a few embarrassing or troublesome teenage incidents, which were pretty much par for the course considering that our fearless hero came of age in the 1960s.

Apparently studying the piano was Alan’s own choice and in no way influenced by his family.  Though the bio states that there was very little musical background in the family, they seem to have been amateur music-lovers.  Did Alan exhibit any interest in music before the piano became part of his life?

Actually he did.  Though it’s stretching a point, Alan made up and sang quite elaborate songs for his age starting no later than age four.  Among these were “Hippety-Hop, Hippety-Hop, the Bunny Jumped Over the Traffic Cop” and “Tootah! Tootah! Teddy Bear,” a fairly complex parody of Al Jolson’s “California, Here I Come,” with a totally new text by the budding lyricist and future composer.

Does Alan have any siblings?

No, Alan is an only child.  As he puts it, “I was the oldest, the youngest, and the middle child too.  By the time I was seventeen I had gotten bored with all three of those roles, so I did the natural thing and left home.”

Does Alan have a middle name?

Yes.  His full name is Alan Richard Seidler, though by his teens he had dropped the Richard.  It only shows up occasionally on various legal forms, which we sincerely hope he doesn’t see too often.

Why is Alan so fiercely protective of the identities of his ex-wife and former girlfriends?  It seems some of his past relationships would have made good fodder for the gossip columns when he was at the height of his popularity.

Like many people in the public view (even though he has always considered himself a “B-lister”), most of Alan’s significant others have been singers, actresses and others involved in various aspects of what is now generally known as “The Industry,” Alan strongly feels that these people are as deserving of their privacy as he is, and has vowed to keep it that way to the best of his ability.

How did Alan come by his mastery of blues and ragtime at a time when rock was king?

The answer to this one is two or three-fold.  When Alan was growing up, he learned to entertain his grandmothers by playing and singing songs of the pre-World War I era.  At the same time, in the 1950s and early ‘60s, there were still a couple of radio stations which catered to the “old folks” and from which Alan seems to have picked up some of his ragtime training by listening to such old chestnuts as Ernie Burnett’s Steamboat Rag.

Also, after moving to NYC straight out of high school, he found himself after a few months occupying quarters upstairs from Nick Perls, the owner of his building at 54 King Street and his future producer at Blue Goose Records.  From many evenings spent downstairs at Nick’s in-house studio/record gallery, he absorbed the basics of 1920s-30s blues singing and piano-playing which he later put to good use on albums such as The Duke of Ook and others, as well as incorporating some of the spirit if not always the substance of these pieces into his later “serious” works.  Still, as a product of the rock generation and the Woodstock years, Alan considers himself very much a part of his musical generation and retains a great love for classic rock.

Is there anything notable to say about Alan’s parents, although they were not involved in music per se?

Yes there is.  Armed with nothing but a high school diploma and night-school courses in machine-shop and drafting, Alan’s father, Jack, the quintessential self-made man, pulled himself up and out of the mean streets of the South Bronx and became a mechanical engineer and inventor, though many of his inventions were patented by his employers who received the credit.  Still, he was noticed and began to get progressively better jobs, until in 1958, he and five partners pooled their meager resources to start a small metal-stamping business in Queens, N.Y. At first, the business took off slowly, but within a few years had established a regular and growing clientele.  The business really exploded with the coming of age of the Electronics Age beginning in the early 1970s and began to expand internationally.  When the Electronic Age gave way to the Digital Age in the 1990s and since, Alan’s father was at the forefront of that move as well, and his small company expanded into a global mini-empire with outposts throughout Europe and the Far East, particularly China and India. (By this time all the other original partners had passed away.)  Today, in his early eighties, he travels the world a good six months out of the year, overseeing his ever-expanding family of companies and vows never to retire. Since over 90% of this growth took place after Alan was grown and gone, he has often been quoted as saying, “most of the time, it seems like a dream to me.”

Alan’s mother, Martha, briefly considered a singing career as a pre-teenager, and from her teens onward was a beauty pageant contestant (and frequent winner) until her marriage.  Afterward, as was common in that era, she was a lifelong housewife but never gave up singing for her own pleasure, frequently accompanied by the young Alan when he was available. When she was stricken with Alzheimer’s Disease in 1991, a vital part of the family was slowly but surely removed one day at a time, but, always a fighter, she battled on until her death in February 2003.

Does Alan have any favorite charities he contributes to on a regular basis?

Yes.  Due to his mother’s affliction, Alan has taken a considerable interest in Alzheimer’s research and gives regularly to the Alzheimer’s Association several times a year.  As more people are becoming aware, he likes to emphasize that this is not a disease which, as was commonly thought, strikes only the elderly.

Of course, as one might expect, he also gives to many musical organizations, especially those that help to train and support the work of budding composers.