A Conversation with Michael Feinstein

Joe Alterman: I’d like to give you a little background that’ll kind of help inform this conversation. I’m 33, the Executive Director of this organization, but until 2018, my entire professional career has been as jazz pianist. My mentors are Les McCann and Ramsey Lewis and I’ve done a lot of work with both of them. I’m definitely proud to be Jewish but identify more as a cultural Jew. The opportunity to run this organization arose in 2018, when our organization was still called the Atlanta Jewish Music Festival, and what drew me to it is my fascination with Jewish contributions to music - and I love the challenge of exploring the concept and question of "what is Jewish music?". I’ve since chosen for our organization to define the Jewishness of the music by its story and not necessarily by its melody; Jewish contributions to Music. That said, I grew up going to a few classes on “Jewish Music." At each one, the teacher would say, “George Gershwin was Jewish,” play a Gershwin song and then say, “Dorothy Fields was Jewish,” and play a Dorothy Fields song, and then, “Michael Feinstein is Jewish” and play one of your songs. That was it. The people in the classes loved it, and seemed to enjoy learning that so-and-so is Jewish, but I’d be left feeling like something was missing. What, if anything, is missing here, to you? And how does it feel to you to know that people teach you in a similar fashion in similar “Jewish music classes?”

Michael Feinstein: Well, in the case of the Gershwins, they, as you probably already know, were not religious Jews, but culturally, it was a very important part of their upbringing. And there is a lineage that comes from their heritage that is an important part of what they created. And that's probably the case with all artists, perhaps something obvious to state, but nonetheless significant in that the ripple effect of where they came from is imbued in the DNA of their songs, and in George Gershwin's larger scale compositions as well. Ira Gershwin, whom I was lucky enough to know fairly well, did not even believe in God, especially after having experienced the painful loss of his brother at the age of 38. However, he sensed to understand the spiritual aspects of music, and that mysterious thing that happens with songwriting that comes from unseen elements. The cultural part of his Jewishness is expressed in the songs in various ways, and I think a lot of the humor that is in his songs comes from Jewish heritage.

There was an author, a man named Charles Schwartz, who wrote a very salacious and smarmy biography of George Gershwin filled with half-truths and innuendo. And he devoted a huge section to comparing Gershwin songs phrase by phrase to Hebrew religious pieces, which is a bunch of hooey - saying that “S’Wonderful” came from this Jewish prayer, and this came from that. And that I found absurd, as did Ira Gershwin. And I inherited his disdain because it's very easy for anyone to create a theory and prove it and legitimize it. For example, a once famous music critic named Abram Chasins claimed that Gershwin had stolen his musical inspiration from Rachmaninoff and supposedly Rachmaninoff was angry. And then somebody else wrote a whole thing about how Gershwin was more influenced by Edvard Grieg than others. And they all have musical examples and all of this stuff to prove their belief, but none of it is true. I mean, he was influenced by everything, and he was influenced as much by Jewish music as he was by the cultural melting pot of New York, all the sounds that he absorbed that went into his work. And having said all that he did spend a lot of time at the Yiddish theater and knew Shalom Secunda and was well acquainted with Yiddish theater. And he learned a certain kind of theatricality there that was part melodrama and part lament.

He told Cole Porter - and this was corroborated by Ira because it's such a good story, you wonder if somebody made it up - that when Porter came to him early in Porter's career - even though Porter was older than George - claiming that he could not seem to write a hit song. George responded by saying, "You have to write good Jewish music." And Porter laughed and said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, music of lament…minor key modalities, that folk element or that Jewish element will give you great inspiration.” And indeed, that's exactly what happened with Porter. If you look at the Porter catalog, you will find more minor key hit songs and creations from Porter than any other composer.

JA: Yeah, arguably “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To,” and “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” might be the most Jewish sounding songs in the song book. 

MF: Yeah, exactly. I mean the middle part of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” sounds cantorial. [singing “ya dy dy/ya dy dy/ya dy dy”]. That's literally something a cantor would sing in the synagogue.

JA: I asked George Wein "What's Jewish music?" And he said, "Cole Porter." He said that Cole Porter understood that 80% of the audience coming to see shows when he started to write were Jews coming over from Yiddish theater. And he had to write music that resonated with them, so to Wein, that made Porter’s music more Jewish than, for example, Harold Arlen’s. 

MF: Well, I don't know that I agree with that, but it's an interesting theory. But you didn't disagree with George Wein - that I learned.

JA: It’s a fun conversation. It’s fascinating to hear people create their own interpretations of Jewish parts of American Songbook. I've heard people say that “Over The Rainbow” is foreshadowing the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel – and in regards to Irving Berlin saying his Judaism has nothing to do with it, people sometimes say that saying that your Judaism has nothing to do with it is the most Jewish thing you could say.

MF: Yeah, well that email that's been circulating forever about “Over the Rainbow” and the war, it's... I don't believe it. Yeah. I just think it's, again, another projection, and because they had to write a song for character and for a plot situation in the film. But again, their backgrounds were such that those elements were definitely in everything they wrote, but it wasn't a conscious effort. And I love the story about Kern when he was going to be writing a musical of Marco Polo, and somebody, Ira or somebody, said, "Well, how are you going to make it sound Oriental?" He said, "Don't worry, it'll be good Jewish music."

JA: I'm curious what you think about the major-minor shift. Do you think that's a Jewish device in American music? Or do you think there is actually any Jewish devices in American music?

MF: Well, the major minor shift is folk music. It's not confined to Jewish music. Irving Caesar who wrote the lyrics to “Swanee,” “Tea For Two,”I Want to Be Happy”…Irving said that Jewish music is folk music and folk…all... I don't know if he said all folk music is music of lament or all music of lament is folk music. It must be all folk music is music of lament. It is all that minor modality. So, to say that it's Jewish or it's Romanian or it's Russian or it's wherever, it all has that in common as it does with African-American spirituals. So it's hard to create a defining line. However, one could argue that the Jewish culture had a very different kind of music in the synagogue from Christian music. And in that sense, it's closer to popular music – that major-minor shift. So, in that sense, there's a throughline.

And the other thing that was told to me, and I don't remember by who sadly, was that in the early days of what we now refer to as Tin Pan Alley, music publishing was a field that Jews could get into without prejudice, which I'd heard for years. But the thing that I haven't heard was that a lot of young Jewish boys who sang in the synagogue choirs were recruited for the music publishing business because they would hire these young kids to go around to vaudeville houses and stand up in the audience and sing a song or to help plug a song. So, there was a direct connection with plucking kids out of the synagogue choirs and bringing them into the music business. So, there is an inherent Jewish connection in that sense. And if you look at the history of the Whitmarks and the publishers, there's a very definite Jewish connection. And of course, all ethnicities could get involved in the music business because you could be Black, you could be Irish, you could be Italian, whatever. If you could deliver the goods, you're in. So, in that sense, it was just about talent. It wasn't defined by other factors.

JA: I know you bonded with so many legendary composers who were Jewish. Do you think your being Jewish had anything to do with that bond being deepened?

MF: Well, in the sense that it was another part of the language and a commonality, the common language I could speak or express. So in that sense, yes. Because when Ira would explain to me that he put the phrase [speaks Yiddish] for the entrance of the French ambassador that's supposed to be French and actually is Yiddish, where it means “where does it hurt you where?” He knew I understood that, those sorts of things. It was a Yiddish phrase. So I could speak that language. And even Harry Warren who was Catholic, the youngest of I think 12 kids, born in Brooklyn in 1893, he spoke Yiddish because he was raised in a part of Brooklyn that there were a lot of Italians and there were a lot of Jews. So, he was Jewish. So again, it's again, that melting element of New York, where he was as proud of the fact that he could speak Yiddish as he was of his Italian heritage.

JA: Would y’all talk about the Jewish thing ever? You and Ira, for example. Or was it just assumed that it was there?

MF: Well, he would talk about it in terms of refuting it from Charles Schwartz's book when they tried to draw a direct line to it. So, he was very much saying there's no great Jewish influence in our work because he didn't see it. And as far as he was concerned, there was no conscious Jewish influence. Unconsciously of course there is, but consciously there's not, because he was raised in a family where his mother would draw the blinds on the High Holidays so neighbors wouldn't see that they were not observant. So, to him, he didn't think in those terms.

JA: Do you hear anything within “It Ain't Necessarily So” and the Haftorah blessing?

MF: Well, I hear a hemiola [laughing]…Yeah, I can hear that. And could he have been subconsciously influenced by that? Sure, it's possible. I don't think it was conscious though. Except in the sense that knowing that he had that conversation with Porter, he was aware of the Jewish sound and the sound of lament, and so that makes sense. And apropos of that, I must have put this in my book, I can't remember, but Marshall Barer collaborated with Duke Ellington on his last Broadway musical, “Pousse-Café.” Marshall wrote a rather irreverent lyric where it was irreverent about the Bible, some reference. And Duke, who was a very complex man…he was, in spite of the fact that he was a world class womanizer, was also on some level religious. And he said to Marshall, "You cannot blaspheme the Lord, something bad will happen. You can't do that, that's against God." He said you can't put anything like that into a song. And Marshall said, "What about George Gershwin, and ‘It Ain't Necessarily So?’" And Ellington said, "Yeah, and look what happened to him."

JA: Whoa! That's wild. How did you get inspired to do a Jewish American song book program?

MF: I just started singing songs and everyone said, "Oh, that's Jewish, that was written by a Jew." And I discovered I was always singing my whole life. So, someone says, "I want a Jewish song book program." "No problem." You take out Cole Porter or you leave in Cole Porter and say he wrote Jewish sounding tunes to tell the story I told you about Gershwin. So, it was a no brainer in that sense. But I discovered it early on because when I started reading the biographies of these writers, I discovered that many of them were immigrants and came from Jewish backgrounds or there was a rabbi or a cantor in the family or that sort of thing. So, it was something that I was aware of for a long time.

Join us on February 5, 2023 for Michael Feinstein’s special performance of the Jewish American Songbook at the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center. 

Be sure to have a listen to Feinstein’s upcoming release, Gershwin Country: a brand-new album from the GRAMMY®- and Emmy-nominated entertainer Michael Feinstein, who reimagines the classic songs of George and Ira Gershwin through the contemporary lens of country music. Executive produced by his longtime friend and collaborator Liza Minnelli, the album pairs Feinstein with some of the biggest names in country music, including Dolly Parton, Alison Krauss, Brad Paisley and Rosanne Cash. Available for pre-order now on CD and digital, Gershwin Country hits stores March 11—with a portion of all proceeds benefitting MusiCares®, a partner of the Recording Academy® that provides a support system of health and human services across a spectrum of needs, including physical and mental health, addiction recovery, preventative clinics, unforeseen personal emergencies and disaster relief to the music community.