About Michael Feinstein
Michael Jay Feinstein is an American singer, pianist, and music revivalist. He is an archivist and interpreter for the repertoire known as the Great American Songbook. In 1988, he won a Drama Desk Special Award for celebrating American musical theatre songs. Feinstein is also a multi-platinum-selling, five-time Grammy-nominated recording artist. He is the artistic director for The Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel, Indiana.
Feinstein was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Florence Mazie , an amateur tap dancer, and Edward Feinstein, a sales executive for the Sara Lee Corporation and a former amateur singer. He is Jewish. At the age of 5, he studied piano for a couple of months until his teacher became angered that he was not reading the sheet music she gave him, since he was more comfortable playing by ear. As his mother saw no problem with her son's method, she took him out of lessons and allowed him to enjoy music his own way.
After graduating from high school, Feinstein worked in local piano bars for two years, moving to Los Angeles when he was age 20. Through the widow of concert pianist-actor Oscar Levant, he was introduced in 1977 to Ira Gershwin, who hired him to catalogue his extensive collection of phonograph records. The assignment led to six years of researching, cataloguing and preserving the unpublished sheet music and rare recordings in Gershwin's home, Ira's works but also those of his composer brother George Gershwin. During Feinstein's years with Gershwin, he also got to know Gershwin's next-door neighbor, singer Rosemary Clooney, with whom Feinstein formed a friendship lasting until Clooney's death. Feinstein served as musical consultant for the 1983 Broadway show My One and Only, a musical pastiche of Gershwin tunes.
By the mid-1980s, Feinstein was a nationally known cabaret singer-pianist famed for being a proponent of the Great American Songbook. In 1986, he recorded his first CD, Pure Gershwin , a collection of music by George and Ira Gershwin. He followed this with Live at the Algonquin ; Remember: Michael Feinstein Sings Irving Berlin ; Isn't It Romantic , a collection of standards and his first album backed by an orchestra; and Over There , featuring the music of America and Europe during the First World War. Feinstein recorded Pure Imagination, his only children's album, in 1992. In the 1987 episode "But Not for Me" of the TV series thirtysomething, he sang "But Not for Me", "Love Is Here to Stay" and Isn't It Romantic?.
By 1988, Feinstein was starring on Broadway in a series of in-concert shows: Michael Feinstein in Concert , Michael Feinstein in Concert: "Isn't It Romantic" , and Michael Feinstein in Concert: Piano and Voice . He returned to Broadway in 2010, in a concert special duo with Dame Edna titled All About Me .
1991 saw Feinstein's persona as a cabaret performer parodied in the third season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which covered the Kaiju movie Gamera vs. Guiron. At the episode's close, Feinstein, played by the show's head writer Michael J. Nelson, sang a cabaret version of the Gamera theme song to the characters Dr. Clayton Forrester and TV's Frank.
In the early 1990s, Feinstein embarked on a songbook project where he performed an album featuring the music of a featured composer, often accompanied by the composer. These included collaborations with Burton Lane , Jule Styne , Jerry Herman , Hugh Martin , Jimmy Webb and Jay Livingston/Ray Evans . He has also recorded three albums of standards with Maynard Ferguson: Forever , Such Sweet Sorrow , and Big City Rhythms .
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