Michael Feinstein is one of the most popular and richest Pianist who was born on September 7, 1956 in Columbus, Ohio, United States. Musician, anthropologist and archivist. To reclaim classical works that he loved, he founded the Great American Songbook.
In an episode of TV’s thirtysomething, he performed But Not For Me and Love Is Here To Stay. in dream sequences.
After graduating from high school, Feinstein worked in local piano bars for two years, moving to Los Angeles when he was 20. Through the widow of concert pianist-actor Oscar Levant, in 1977 he was introduced to Ira Gershwin, who hired him to catalogue his extensive collection of phonograph records. The assignment led to six years of researching, cataloguing and preserving the unpublished sheet music and rare recordings in Gershwin’s home, thus building an archive of not just Ira’s works but also those of his composer brother George Gershwin, who had died four decades earlier. During Feinstein’s years with Gershwin, he also got to know Gershwin’s next-door neighbor, singer Rosemary Clooney, with whom Feinstein formed a close friendship lasting until Clooney’s death. Feinstein served as musical consultant for the 1983 Broadway show My One and Only, a musical pastiche of Gershwin tunes.
By the mid-1980s, Feinstein was a nationally known cabaret singer-pianist famed for being a proponent of the Great American Songbook. In 1986, he recorded his first CD, Pure Gershwin (1987), a collection of music by George and Ira Gershwin. He followed this with Live at the Algonquin (1986); Remember: Michael Feinstein Sings Irving Berlin (1987); Isn’t It Romantic (1988), a collection of standards and his first album backed by an orchestra; and Over There (1989), featuring the music of America and Europe during the First World War. Feinstein recorded his only children’s album, Pure Imagination, in 1992. In the 1987 episode “But Not For Me” of the TV series thirtysomething he sang “But Not For Me”, “Love Is Here to Stay” and Isn’t It Romantic? as parts of dream sequences.
In 2008, he married Terrence Flannery at a ceremony conducted by Judith Sheindlin, a television judge.
