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.

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Story produced and edited by Emanuele Secci.

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