| Biography | Born in London in 1906, he was one of seven children in a Russian émigré family who had lived on the Sceptered Isle but one year at the time. He had a naturally musical nature that he had to suppress amid the economic privations of life in London's East End -- it wasn't until age nine that he got his first formal music lessons, and those came from an older brother. He later found a proper violin teacher, and was good enough to earn his first money with the instrument at age 12, playing in a movie theater orchestra. He found that first work experience exhausting but fulfilling, leaving school in the afternoon and going directly to the cinema, where he worked till ten at night -- the exhaustion he ignored, or, at least, took in stride, while the education he got he regarded as priceless. As he later said in an interview quoted by Stuart Upton, it introduced him to "all sorts of new and exciting music." [http://www.allmusic.com/artist/albert-sandler-mn0001510511/biography] |