By Christy Scannell
SDUN Senior Editor
Michael Feinstein didn’t fully appreciate Frank Sinatra. At first.
It’s a bold statement—few people dare critique the Chairman of the Board—but Feinstein’s passion for and performance of American standards has earned him review rights and monikers such as “The Ambassador of the Great American Songbook.” A multi-platinum-selling entertainer who plays 150 shows annually, Feinstein has released numerous recordings of standards in his career of 20-plus years, the most recent of which is “The Sinatra Project.” Feinstein will bring those Sinatra hits to the San Diego Symphony Aug. 27 and 28 as part of the Bridgepoint Education Summer Pops series.
Clearly, he was able to set aside his disdain for Sinatra’s tarnished lyrics. Perhaps that happened when he spent time with the man himself.
“He was very, very nice to me at a time in my life when I was nobody and there was no prize in being nice to me,” Feinstein said. “I think he appreciated my enthusiasm for his work and my knowledge of his career. I was able to ask him a lot of questions and he answered them rapid fire even though his memory was failing at that point.”
Feinstein was no stranger to being in the presence of musical greatness. As a young man in the late ’70s he left his piano bar playing gig in his Columbus, Ohio, hometown and sought fame in Los Angeles. While selling pianos (he had been playing by ear since age 5), an incredible set of circumstances led him to the door of composer Ira Gershwin and his wife, Leonore. Mrs. Gershwin, impressed with Feinstein’s knowledge of Gershwin tunes, hired him to be the ailing Ira’s companion and assistant.
“He was one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met,” said Feinstein, who spent years archiving Gershwin’s work while under his tutelage. “He was a born educator. He taught me about lyrics and the collaborative process—it was an extraordinary education I couldn’t have gotten at any college.”
Instead, Feinstein went on to bring standards back to audiences who had forgotten them as rock ‘n’ roll and disco had taken over the public fancy. Beginning with “Live at the Algonquin” in 1987, a recording of his New York cabaret act, he continued to honor writers such as Ira and George Gershwin (“Pure Gershwin”), Irving Berlin, Burton Lane, Jule Styne, Jerry Herman and Hugh Martin with recorded songbooks.
It is not a task he takes lightly.
“These songs were created in the thousands by people who were in most cases in friendly competition with each other. The standards were so high that this dizzying body of work is unsurpassed,” he said. “It was a combination of great artists all creating output at the same time and everyone agrees that that time will never come again nor will it ever be bettered.
“They always were looking for an eloquent way of expressing the oft-expressed and that’s what great art is—it takes the mundane experience and heightens it and makes it extraordinary looking at it from a different perspective.”
Feinstein said he used that same method in his approach to the Sinatra recording.
“My first (intention) was not to imitate him. My second was to emulate the essence of what he did, to take the innovations of what he did in music and incorporate them in a way that would evoke him but not copy him,” he said.
Acknowledging that “was not easy to do,” Feinstein said one way he made the music his own was by interpreting Sinatra tunes in a way that Sinatra did not. For example, Feinstein added a Nelson Riddle flavor to “Begin the Beguine,” a song Sinatra never performed with Riddle, one of his favorite conductors. The result is a version that is “familiar but original,” Feinstein said.
The San Diego show will include songs from “The Sinatra Project” as well as tunes Feinstein arranged but didn’t record for the album, such as “Luck Be a Lady,” and other American songbook favorites.
“It will be a theatrical show with a lot of anecdotes and a lot of fun marginalia in between the songs,” he said. “It puts them in a context that I think makes them very, very compelling.”
