Michael Feinstein: On the Pops and the Popular Songbook

It is a rare cabaret room that is honored by the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall. In fact, Feinstein’s at Loews Regency may well be the first room to receive an honor like this. But tonight, the Pops will celebrate the tenth anniversary of Feinstein’s with a concert that will include a new work by Stephen Flaherty and performances by Cheyenne Jackson, Brian d'Arcy James, Idina Menzel, Anika Noni Rose, Ashford & Simpson, and the room’s founder, Michael Feinstein himself.

“The New York Pops is an institution that is very important to the city of New York,” Feinstein says in his soft-spoken singer’s voice, choosing every word carefully. “Skitch Henderson was a visionary in creating an orchestra that filled a much needed gap in the city, and I’ve been happy to be associated with them, performing with them a number of times. And to be honored by them is wonderful, because I so respect what they do for the community culturally, and to be acknowledged for that same thing by them is a great gift.”

As to the gala celebration itself, and the honor of the recognition, he is demure. “To be acknowledged for one’s art is always a wonderful thing,” he says softly. “In this case, to be personally honored is lovely, because I did put my heart and soul into Feinstein’s at the Regency and had no idea if it was going to work or not when it was created. The examples I’ve seen in the past of rooms run by people who are performers did not last because most of us, as performers, are not business people. So what I tried to do was get involved with people who would know how to run a business so I could focus on creative aspects. And that’s worked well. Luckily, the Tisch family, especially Jon Tisch, embraced the idea, and it is really the Tisch’s who have made the club a success.”

“I’ve always had a fantasy of having a nightclub,” he continues. “I suppose many performers have the same fantasy. And yet I didn’t know how to practically achieve it. The Tisch family had hired me through the years for several events—Jon Tisch’s wedding was when I first met them, and we stayed in touch and stayed on friendly terms—and Bob Tisch, who is now gone, was the patriarch of the family. He and his brother Larry had started in the nightclub business…[and] when we approached them with the idea of creating a nightclub in the Regency Hotel, they embraced it. They were very interested in it, and they made it happen. So to be able to open a nightclub in a five-star hotel was an extraordinarily lucky thing.”

Even though the room bears his name, Feinstein is quick to point out that he is not involved in the business
aspects of the cabaret space. And perhaps, he muses, the separation of show and business is one of the secrets of its success. “I am not involved in the day-to-day workings of the room because I have a full-time career as an entertainer,” he says, and praises John Iachetti’s management of the room itself. Iachetti, who used to be the food and beverage manager at the hotel, is now exclusively dedicated to Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, and even handles booking talent for the stage. “I never wanted to be the person who booked the room,” Feinstein says, “because I didn’t want to be in the position of having all of my friends ask me for a job and to create something uncomfortable in that sense. So the booking has always been the responsibility of other people. And that’s worked pretty well, even though, certainly, I’m involved in the names that run by me, and they want to make sure that if someone is in the room, it’s someone that I would want in the room, because there might be a situation where there’s for one reason or another somebody that wouldn’t be appropriate for the room. And I can’t give you an example of that, ‘cause it hasn’t really come up,” he adds quickly, “but there is that option. “

Michael Feinstein made his name by giving the American Songbook a jolt of electricity and making classic songs seem fresh and new again. “I think any entertainer who’s successful can take a song and not only put a personal stamp on it, but share the emotion in the work and transmit it to The Audience,” he says. “As an entertainer, the first job is as the word is defined: to entertain. The first thing we have to do is entertain. For me, because I sing songs that are primarily from the Great American Songbook, I feel a responsibility to communicate or impart the intentions of the songwriters, to try and capture as much of a sense of the original song as I can, yet put my own stamp on it and hopefully interpret it in a way that makes it fresh and give it a contemporary feeling. The thing that makes these songs last,” he adds, “is that they are timeless in their emotional content and they are unique in their construction and the eloquence of the music and the lyrical combination. It’s like Shakespeare or Beethoven, if you will Timeless. It’s work that transcends the time in which it was written. And even though these songs were written only five or six decades ago, or a few more, they still have an immediacy to them that I think will last through the ages.”

“My career as a performer began because of my enthusiasm for songs,” he continues. “It came from a desire to share and preserve the music. And I’ve been  involved with a lot of endeavors—through recording;  through master classes; [and] creating the Feinstein Foundation, which is a non-profit organization for the preservation of this music to find ways that keep it going—and I think that it’s very important to keep the music going for younger generations.”

Keeping the music alive is not only important for future generations, but for singers and musicians today.
“For any entertainer, it’s a challenge to stay current in the entertainment business,” Feinstein says thoughtfully. “I remember seeing an interview with Bette Midler in which she talked about how hard show business was. And I thought, ‘Well, it’s no different for Bette Midler than it is for somebody just starting out.’” He diplomatically describes show business as a “most peculiar business,” and points out that as opposed to more staid, traditional careers, the artist’s life is much less sequential and predictable. “This is the most ephemeral, quixotic business, and I think that anyone that has any sort of longevity in this business deserves a gold star or some sort of acclaim,” he says. “I started out playing in piano bars and here I am, over 20 years later, still doing what I want to do and still having audiences who want to hear the music.  And to me, that’s been the greatest challenge, and I’m very proud that I still have audiences and still have a career.”

Feinstein credits much of that career to an unlikely friendship that grew out of what could have been just another job. As a promising young pianist, he was hired to help catalogue Ira Gershwin’s record collection, and a musical torch was passed. “Ira Gershwin was a marvelous human being,” he says fondly. “[A] very kind, gentle soul; a natural teacher; a man who has been maligned in the last several years—which I find vexing—but was a pure soul, and intensely sensitive. In the period  when I met Ira, he was in a depression, having lost one of his closest friends, and feeling that the world had passed him by—not so much his songs, but his own personal life had diminished, as happens when people grow older to a point of isolation and solitude to a large degree. And so my entry into his life created happiness for him and tremendous joy for me, and I was thrust into the role of student and acolyte, much to my delight, and so I spent six years with Ira teaching me about his work, about American popular songs in general about the era, and also educating me by example. I saw what was not settled in his life and observed how he made choices that he regretted, and through all of that, he and his wife nurtured me and groomed me and introduced me to people I never dreamt I would meet, and gave me the basis of the career that I now have. And so he is on my mind every day of my life for one reason or another, and I’ll never be able to sufficiently thank him for the gift that he gave to me except to try and pass on what I can to other people. But the essence of his work contains the best of who he was as a human being.”

After numerous albums celebrating the history of popular American music, Michael Feinstein’s most recent CD release focused on the songs Frank Sinatra made famous. “Frank Sinatra is a quixotic personality, and more has been written about him than can be digested,” he says when asked what attracted him to the subject. “Yet my attraction to his work has always been paramount. I was disinterested in the persona and the gossip and most interested in his art,” he emphasizes, adding that while the Rat Pack and notorious personality might be what initially appeals to new fans of the Sinatra oeuvre, “the thing that makes them stay interested in him is his work. And as an artist, he was unique in his time in that he was not only involved in a recording as a tremendously talented interpreter of music and lyrics, but he also oversaw the production of the music orchestrations, the sound of the recording studio, the placement of the orchestra. All of these other elements reflected his desire to be the best he could be, and so my recording of the Sinatra project is an attempt to emulate his overall style in recording.”

To recreate the feel of a Sinatra recording, Feinstein recorded his album in the same way Sinatra did his. “The recording that I made was done with two microphones for the orchestra, which was the same way they miked the orchestra in the 1950s, in the days of early stereo. And that’s why those recordings have a special clarity in the sound that I think is lost in multi-channel recording today. So my desire was to recreate the sound of what I feel were Sinatra’s greatest recordings made in that period…And the arrangements I created—all fresh and new arrangements—are ones that are an homage to the way that he reinvented interpretations of American standards. And so they have the patina of his taste, but are not literal copies of what he did.”

After the gala celebration, Michael Feinstein will be returning to work on several projects, including writing several original musicals. “That’s something that I’ve flirted with,” he says, “but was sort of thrust into the role of composing something a few years ago that turned out to be a delightful experience. I’ve been working with Warner Brown, who is a British librettist and lyricist, and we wrote a show called The Gold Room that we’re currently reworking, as happens in the evolution of a musical. And we’re very please d with what we’ve written. It’s a two-character musical about an incident in the life of Barbara Hutton, who was the wealthiest woman in the U.S., maybe the world.” The piece had a workshop reading several months ago with Broadway stars Victoria Clark and Jonathan Groff. “That was very exciting, to hear those extraordinary talents sing our songs,” Feinstein says. “I’ve been working on a stage musical version of The Thomas Crowne Affair at the behest of MGM Onstage, and that’s been an equally thrilling experience. It’s extraordinarily challenging, but we feel good about what we’re creating, and there’s just a heady excitement that comes with the creative process that to me is more thrilling than some sort of rollercoaster ride at an amusement park.”