Michael Feinstein Biography

Michael Feinstein (September 7, 1956) is an American singer, pianist. He is one of the most acclaimed interpreters credited with renewing the popularity of the repertoire known as the Great American Songbook.

Feinstein was born to parents Edward and Maizie Feinstein in Columbus, Ohio. His father was a sales executive for the Sara Lee Corporation and former singer, and his mother, a semi-professional tap dancer. Playing piano by ear at age five, he attended piano lessons for a couple of months until his teacher became angered that he wasn't reading the music she gave him to play. Since Michael's mother saw no problem with her son's method, she took him out of lessons and allowed him to enjoy music his own way. Feinstein moved to Los Angeles when he was 19 years old where he met Ira Gershwin through Oscar Levant's widow, June. Following high school, he supported himself by playing in piano bars.

In 1988, his one-man Broadway show called "Isn't It Romantic: Michael Feinstein in Concert" made him famous.

Michael Feinstein is arguably the single most knowledgeable and dedicated musical anthropologist and archivist the Great American Songbook has ever known (a fact not lost on the Library of Congress, which recently elected Feinstein to the National Sound Recording Advisory Board, an organization dedicated to safeguarding America’s musical heritage).

As detailed in his bestselling 1995 memoir Nice Work If You Can Get It: My Life in Rhythm and Rhyme, the four-time GRAMMY Award-nominee has spent his entire adult life chronicling, cataloging, preserving, protecting, and recording the work of various masters, tending to sidestep bigger names like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin in favor of less-heralded geniuses. Feinstein combines hits and rarities to create the equivalent of a musical biography, in the process often unearthing gems that might otherwise have been forever lost. His past subjects have included a stellar troupe of composers, from Jules Styne, Jerry Herman, Hugh Martin, and Jimmy Webb to Burton Lane, Jay Livingston, and Ray Evans.

Feinstein’s fascination with all aspects of music, which he aptly describes as his “ruling passion,” dates to his adolescence in Columbus, Ohio, but truly took flight when, having moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, fortuitous circumstances led to a meeting with Ira Gershwin. The legendary lyricist, then aged 80, invited Feinstein to catalog his vast record collection. The assignment led to a six-year musical excavation of Gershwin’s home on Beverly Hills’ Roxbury Drive, preserving the legacy of not just Ira but his equally celebrated composer brother George, who had died four decades earlier at the age of 38. Feinstein’s extended tenure on Roxbury Drive also enabled him to get to know next-door neighbor Rosemary Clooney, whose house was once owned by George Gershwin. An intensely close friendship ensued, lasting until Rosemary's death.

Feinstein himself plays a sold-out show there during the holidays every year. Known to many as the "Ambassador of the American Song". His repertoire as a singer/pianist includes songs by many great American songwriters, such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington and Harry Warren. Feinstein finds "lost" older songs, and breathes new life into them, thereby preserving great music for future generations.

Michael revered Ira and George Gershwin, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the pair's work. Michael recounted many stories he knew about the two during his first meeting with Ira, and he was so impressed with the young man that he made him his assistant for 6 years.

Feinstein is also the owner of a nightclub in Manhattan, Feinstein's at the Regency, a showcase for cabaret performers.