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CBS News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Michael Feinstein on passing his love of great songs to the next generation
For most of his 50-year career, Michael Feinstein has shown his love for the great American songs by performing them. "There was something I connected to with the harmonic invention of the songs, the melodic ideas," he said. "They express fundamental emotions in a very eloquent way that people can still relate to." He got his start early, as a little boy In Columbus, Ohio: "When I was five, my father said, 'Let's get a piano.' I sat down and started playing 'Do-Re-Mi' from 'The Sound of Music' with both hands. My mother came in from the kitchen and said, 'Who taught you that?' And I said, 'Nobody!' And she sent me to my room for lying!" He was playing by ear at five years old. Of his childhood he said, "I always felt weird. I always felt different than everybody else. I was a lonely kid. I didn't have many friends. The first classical record I bought was the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, while my friends were all listening to Elton John and Carole King and Carly Simon." But his "unpopular" hobby soon made him a popular entertainer. For 12 years, he played in piano bars, five or six hours a night. "It was mainly gay bars," he said, "'cause those are the places where I could play show tunes without anybody complaining about it." He didn't go to college, but he did get an amazing education. For example, "I learned that I had to program what I was doing as if I was programming a show, with an emotional arc. I learned what to say between the songs that I learned – patter and jokes and shtick and things that keep people engaged." Feinstein moved to L.A. when he was 20, where he met one of his idols: 80-year-old Ira Gershwin, George Gershwin's lyric-writing brother. Ira was so impressed by the young man's encyclopedic knowledge of Gershwin material that he gave him a job. "I was only supposed to be there for a couple of weeks to catalog the phonograph records," Feinstein said. "But I ended up spending six years as Ira's musical companion, an amanuensis, which is a nice word for stooge! It was an incredible time, the most exciting time in my life." In 1986, Feinstein got the invitation that changed his life: to perform in the Oak Room at New York's Algonquin Hotel. "And from that, everything started popping," he said. At 29 years old, Feinstein's career was launched. Decades of glory days lay ahead – on stage, on PBS, on his 86 albums, and in his lifelong friendship with Liza Minnelli. (He's collaborating with her on her new memoir.) But he didn't just want to sing the Great American Songs; he also wanted to collect them. He's amassed a vast collection of memorabilia, recordings and scores, such as the first printing of "Rhapsody in Blue." In recent years Feinstein has become increasingly dedicated to passing his love of the great songs to the next generation. He said, "I'm carrying the weight of the responsibility to present these songs in a way that hopefully will appeal to them. Every time these songs are introduced to a younger person, it's like planting a seed, because it becomes part of them, and it goes on." In that spirit, Feinstein has established the Great American Songbook Foundation in Carmel, Indiana. There's a museum of songwriter artifacts … a performing arts center … and a weeklong Songbook Academy, in which 40 students from around the U.S. are selected to intensively learn about interpreting this music. "And it's right alongside Taylor Swift or Adele or whoever else they're listening to," he said. For Feinstein the Great American Songbook isn't just music from before 1950: "I think that Carole King and Billy Joel and Neil Sedaka and Elton John, they're all part of the American Songbook," he said. "It's not just the 1910s and the '20s and the '30s; it is evolving." Michael Feinstein still performs live all over the country, including a concert of Tony Bennett classics (which you can watch on the streaming service Carnegie Hall+ on August 3) – because maybe the best way of all to keep the classics alive is to keep singing them. For more info: Story produced and edited by Emanuele Secci. See also:
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Scotsman
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Album reviews: Suzanne Vega Peggy Seeger The Supernaturals
Suzanne Vega offers plenty of food for thought on her varied new album, writes Fiona Shepherd Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Suzanne Vega: Flying With Angels (Cooking Vinyl) ★★★ Peggy Seeger: Teleology (Red Grape Music) ★★★★ Andy Bell: Ten Crowns (Crown Recordings) ★★★ The Supernaturals: Show Tunes (Last Night From Glasgow) ★★★★ New York singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega says her first album of exclusively new material in over a decade is themed around struggle. Listening to it, however, is no chore as the ideas, sentiments and musical styles pour forth with the easy practice of an expert performer. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The reassuring chug of acoustic rhythm guitar and Vega's soothing voice are embellished with tremolo guitar trills and cooing backing vocals on peppy opener Speakers' Corner. The song flows freely but the lyrics caution that free speech is a right that comes with accountability. Suzanne Vega | Ebru Yildiz From here, Vega shoots off in myriad directions, taking in the slower, spacious, soaring title track, chunky rock reverberations of Witch, familiar half-spoken pen portrait of Lucinda and the wholly unexpected Eighties sunshine funk groove of Love Thief. She effortlessly rides the tonal contrasts between the freewheeling folk pop waltz Galway and the scampering garage rock'n'roll of Rats and also within songs, channelling Leonard Cohen on Last Train From Mariupol, an undulating lament for the huddled masses of the Ukraine, which then ramps up dramatically with crashing percussion and martial drums. Not everything is quite as arresting as this but there's enough food for thought to go round. US folk legend Peggy Seeger goes out on a musical high, celebrating her 90th birthday by releasing her 25th and final album, forged in the company of her sons Calum and Neill MacColl and daughter-in-law Kate St John. Teleology rages against the dying of the light in part. Seeger remains alive to the troubles of the day, calling out hardship, inequality and greed on Sing About These Hard Times and making a call to protest and direct action on Sit Down, with harmony voices in accord. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Driftwood is her solo ode to refugees, with her voice echoing against the sound of wind, while autoharp, piano and a sighing harmony chorus back her song for the displaced, No Place Like Home. She favours bare balladry throughout, from the poignant valediction of Apple Tree to a touching rendition of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, written for her by her then husband Ewan MacColl. Her work here is maybe not quite done as she shares a final impish wish on I Want to Meet Paul Simon, a sweet ode from one musical icon to another, populated by his characters and speckled with his lyrics: 'I've got fifty ways to meet him but I'm running out of time'. Andy Bell | Sean Black Erasure frontman Andy Bell is on a galactic dance odyssey on latest solo album Ten Crowns, kicking off with celestial trance track Breaking Thru the Interstellar, before applying bells and whistles to the hi-NRG-inflected disco of Dance For Mercy. He is bolstered by the mighty alto strains of US singer Sarah Potenza on pumping electro pop number Lies So Deep and by his vocal shero Debbie Harry on middling affair Heart's A Liar. Bell mostly paints in broad brushstrokes with a handful of pomp flourishes, none more so than the church organ solo which opens Latino electro pop plea Dawn of Heavens Gate. The Supernaturals | Contributed Glasgow indie outfit The Supernaturals were pulled along in the Britpop slipstream of the late Nineties, making it on to Top of the Pops and numerous advert soundtracks with their most enduring track, Smile. The group have released three albums since reforming in 2012, their latest inspired by their original guitarist Derek McManus's direction that the band should write 'show tunes'. In practice, this means everything from the dreamy synth arpeggios of Clockwork Orange to the grungey Burn the Witch, alternative lullaby The Dread to the rollicking regret of If You Can't Love Yourself, all dispatched with seasoned panache. CLASSICAL Bruckner: Symphony No 9 (Hallé) ★★★★ Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad To compete or not to complete: that's the question posed by many of history's unfinished symphonies. Bruckner's Ninth figures among them, his last great symphonic utterance left after his death as substantial drafts, but requiring skilled and sympathetic archeological work to be turned into a convincing conclusion. Several have done so, most recently the editorial team led, in this latest 2022 revision, by John A Phillips. The impact of the Finale - now a bold statement of brazen self-belief rather than the sublime resignation of the foregoing Adagio that ends most 'unfinished' performances - is powerfully expressed in this fascinating recording by the Hallé Orchestra under its new chief conductor Kahchun Wong. The Finale aside, Wong asserts his own broadly-paced view of the entire symphony, the patience he applies to unfolding its gargantuan structure marked by an unexpected sensuousness. Mostly it works, sometimes it challenges natural instinct. It's definitely thought-provoking. Ken Walton FOLK Flook: Sanju (Flatfish Records) ★★★★
