Joanna Sternberg, the musician and songwriter, grew up in Manhattan Plaza, a pair of apartment towers west of Times Square that are reserved mostly for performing artists. Sternberg, now thirty-one, and Sternberg’s parents lived, and still live together, in a two-bedroom on the fortieth floor.
Music was everywhere, in the building and in the blood. Two prominent jazz bassists lived down the hall, and Sternberg studied with both of them, while getting piano lessons, on twenty-six, from Margaret Pine, who taught Alicia Keys. (“She almost babysat me,” Sternberg said of Keys, who had given her number to Sternberg’s father, Michael, a musician himself.) Then, there were the forebears. Michael’s father, Harold, was a longtime basso with the Metropolitan Opera, who’d urged Joanna, sitting on his lap, to sing stanzas back…
