Page "Alexis Korner" Paragraph 1

Alexis Andrew Nicholas Koerner was born in Paris to an Austrian Jewish father and a half-Turkish half-Greek mother, and spent his childhood in France, Switzerland, and North Africa.

He arrived in London in 1940 at the start of World War II.

One memory of his youth was listening to a record by black pianist Jimmy Yancey during a German air raid.

Korner said, " From then on all I wanted to do was play the blues.