welcome to the westminster toth forum where for thirty two years we have engaged the public in reflection and dialogue on the key issues of our day from an ethical perspective learn more about us online at westminster forum dot org and you tonight's guest speaker michael feinstein is an emmy and grammy nominated musician who is widely recognized for his commitment to preserving the legacy of america's popular song growing up in columbus ohio he was playing the piano by ear tender age of five and mastering the music of the great american songbook at age twenty he moved to los angeles and began working with the people who created the music he loved in particular the house to our very own orchestra hall across the street from westminster in addition to his extensive touring he serves on the national recording preservation board of the library of congress and is director of the jazz and popular song series for new york city's jazz at lincoln center he hosts the public radio program song travels and his p b s specials include the documentary series michael feinstein's american songbook his new gershwins and me and the focus of tonight's presentation is a tribute to the brothers who most influenced his life and career ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming to the westminster child forum michael fein with concerning music and survive unless times how often do you experience a moment in your life that you recognize as life than one that is a crossroads that will lead you down the different path and a gentleman when i lived and people have asked me quite often how did that happen well that's a very interesting story i think that's the best place for me to start to tell you how i came to meet ira gershwin and why the age of twenty and that i always had tastes that went to the opposite of my contemporaries of that time but there was something about the music of the gershwins and their contemporaries that attracted me and a very early age i was born columbus ohio whole new clause please thank you and my parents are very musical and always encouraged me in all things having to do with music even though they could not play instruments my father took a few things a piano but they just loved music and music was always around the house and the age of five they had to save enough money to be able to buy a new home on the first home that full accompaniment in that age and i started playing the songs that that i heard around the house until we watched on television shows like sing along with mitch or has felt sure for me even better at that age five i knew there was something  years it created a feeling inside me that literally changed my life i had never had the sort of galvanizing experience of music that happened with rex in the womb and suddenly i had to find out about this man who created this music who were  find so much so it could written by the gershwins and to find out about them and find books about them but in those times long before the end had it was not easy to find cheap easy for the songs will find recordings and so i was always doing what i could and i was very nervous and trying to make some sort of conversation with ira trying to find something to say that would make me sound like a like a fool and i said mr well they hired me to carry more of the collection photographs for us and it's the kind of job that i would pay them to do and there i was coming in to beverly hills every day sitting at the feet of the master catalog of his records and listening to i asking me questions about this and that and realize that i was very knowledgeable kid at the age of twenty about his work and he was perplexed by and he looked at me he said how many more like you are there  atrophy but nonetheless i did play and we evolved a relationship that was very special to me i became sort of the son or grandson that he ever had and i was so and who brought sort of life and i want you to know that your being here is are important for him and to me and she said i'm going to open up every closet and drawer so you can find your kind of memorabilia or papers or whatever it is they'll keep you busy so please stay here is all you can and most importantly keep my husband occupied so for six years that was my job to to keep ira happy to keep him present world always find some peace of musical recording or something that would  were true in my college education and because of that i'm never be able to properly repay either for what he did for me and repeatedly and or an event and one of the reasons i wrote the book was to try and preserve any of the stories and anecdotes that were handed down to me that otherwise might not exist and might not survive because i wrote talking so much about the target of the songs i also decided to include a cd with the book because it's one thing to write about the songs but of one of the things that was very interesting for me was learning about the process of how many of these songs were created because the creative process of writing a piece of music is very mysterious and the inspiration can come from anywhere i believe it's divine i think a lot of it comes from the spiritual source but the nuts and bolts of achieving the final product of a song is sometimes a very circuitous path and accidents happen that starred the great british musical theatre performer gertrude lawrence and they had to come up with a ballad that she could sing in a rather plaintive small voice and yet this particular day george and i are working on the sister francis who asked him a question and he slowed down played that's how they need to write this song that was always particularly to ira because i wrote these words just around the time he married his wife leonore and he later confessed to me that one line in the song wrote about himself he may not be the man some girls think of as handsome so this is for for our  york september twenty sixth eighty ninety eight two forty two standard having him and his family were russian jewish immigrants they come from st petersburg morris and rose gershwin they were started playing piano for the schools and when all the sudden he was playing the piano and started to exhibit this extraordinary talent for an ira it was the first person in the gershwin family to recognize a georgia talent and he was so shocked by what his brother could do that i don't recognize that in those early years of his brother was going to turn out to be somebody who would want in the world famous i was absolutely convinced of that and george was a guy who by the time he was twenty years old wrote a song called swanning that sold millions and millions of copies and he was pursuing a career as a professional musician largely self taught he took piano lessons here and there but he exhibited this extraordinary talent that was that was amazing now in nineteen twenty there was an interview with george gershwin right after someone came success and he was asked what his ambitions were he said that he hoped wanted to write serious concert works with an american thing he felt that the most organic roots of american music came from african americans even though in that article he referred to them as the music of the dark it's which was the term that i just was in use at that time even  george did not have a prejudiced or racist phone body in any event in nineteen twenty he basically set out in this interview to accomplish everything that he did over the next seventeen years of his life well by nineteen twenty four it was an amazing combination and that ira had this wonderful aptitude for writing clever and unusual ways of expressing love and combined with through his now days they were writing songs the likes of which the musical theater world had never heard before and so here were these two geniuses changing the face of the american music and george possibly stretching his own limitations by getting whatever education he could and they were george had a specific vision mind he saw the novel written on portal but to those who were and thought that was the best source material for an opera well immediately everybody started to criticize him the african american community said who is this man think he is trying to write music about our people is huge community said he's in over his head his tin pan alley cronies were jealous he wanted to introduce him to the metropolitan opera but they would not produce it with an all black cast your insistence that this was an opera for  african americans and he wanted it done by an authentic black cast and the met said we don't have enough african american officers we can't do this and we don't think it will draw and they wanted to do it in black fields and your said no thank you and he went on and on until he found a company that produces a theater deal which was not the most flush organization but they wanted to do it and they agreed to an all black cast and it ended up being produced on broadway well through that to you period that he was working on poor events he never wavered in his belief in his work and yet when the piece opened it was a financial failure it received a great deal of criticism even though the the reviews were more positive th negative but it was clear that in the eyes of most people it was a misfire but george gershwin never wavered in his belief that after his passing it would become a work for which he would be long remembered he was that kind of guy he had an incredible ego and yet he was very generous with his contemporaries now it was harold arlen spoke about george's generosity but also about how he could be very decentered was when george was in taxi cab and the man was driving george i think already this is wonderful he would say thank you i think it is too bad he was just constant in the assessment of his work and i really was quite the opposite i never was such a wallflower and he was very shy and quiet and you'd never know that he was  party and he was embarrassed if you paid a compliment iran's told me something i found extraordinary he was swimming when he was a tease in the east river and there was a lifeguard on duty and lots of other people out by the time he came to again the lifeguard was gone and i said well will you do that you were drowning did you do you cry for help or anything he said no i said why not he said i was too embarrassed that it seemed like a cruel joke and i remember working with george up to the area and and they were working on something i had to finish up in george's passing and with george's death my love is here to stay as much as the songs are part of the lives of so many of us we do have generations that don't live in him gershwin and that's one of the reasons i created the book for people who might not know anything about them a friend of mine is a voice teacher and she said one of her students got up one day and said i'm going to sing summertime by but that's kind of we were had so that's why i really wanted to do this book one of the things that i put in the book are wrote many beautiful illustrations i guess you could say it's a coffee table book as much as there is a great deal of text and there are productions of many of george gershwin's manuscripts which i think are interesting for people sees and you can see in his handwriting how how fast sile he was in setting down all of this this music and here's a song and i think  both musically and lyrically and i think it's an appropriate way with which the tides are lovely because it certainly describes the way that i feel you can't bla speaker and singer and guest tonight is michael feinstein the ushers are collecting questions from the in house audience i want to remind you that our next forum is in one week thursday november first again in the evening at seven audience first what has to do with the nature of the music that you're formed by that you love so much the gershwin's a great american songbook and how much you think that music reflects the american character and in what ways one of the reasons that the music of the gershwins and irving berlin rodgers and harcourt corner all those writers of what we call the great american songbook lands because there is something in that period that was sort of comparable to the in china renaissance for art and yet the values and the emotions and craft of those songs still relate to us today they are still contemporary in their sensibility and that's why i think they will live and also i think that they do reflect the best of what america is about because many of these writers were jewish immigrants who came from many different places and it was the melting pot of america that was the creative juice and inspiration for this work and because of that i think that these songs are not only the most typically america but i think that they have been our goodwill ambassadors and the most extraordinary thing because people want to hear these songs and they know the words even often when they don't speak english you embrace this music as a young man as you describe there are young people today similarly enthralled with this music music however i created an organization called the feinstein initiative and every year we have a high school competition with high school kids thousands of them entering from all over applying to regions all over the country so there are thousands and thousands of kids who care about her american songbook and that's because they can find it now on the internet you can look up and find anything on the internet and therefore they can discover at the water's ability how they were driven gershwin room russ colombo or whoever are out there to be found and so there are many many young people that are interested i don't think it will ever replace pop music as we know it now but i think there will always be a place for it and i think that there will always be young people who will gravitate towards it are there new songs being added to the great american songbook there are there are new songs being added to the group american songbook however we won't know who they are for twenty years or so because to me what denotes a big part of the rebirth songbook is the fact that it last these songs have lasted for decades and decades because they are constantly being reinvented they're being recorded somebody new generations whether songs performed by lady gaga and justin bieber will be heard in twenty years i don't know i just don't know the thing is that these songs written in the twenty's and thirty's and forty's and such were recorded by many different people i think that is the hallmark of what makes a song last so it's only time will tell considered to be politically correct these days because it's always about a woman pining for a man or a man is that after the man has done wrong it's rare that it was the other way around i guess because most of the songs are written by men but desperate when you think about the fact that the songwriter for running all these rheumatics songs and they often didn't have the most happy to message lives like frank loesser after he divorced his first wife always referred to her thereafter as the evil of two less gender of the litter and city will find all these odd recordings of things like the man in the sun by men because most of the vocalists with bands in those days were men and it wasn't until the women started singing the songs that many of these  became strangers how did a find the term great american songbook what time period does it cover who's included and maybe who's missing it's a difficult question to answer because i don't think that there are specific boundaries of the time of the british arrogance on the for one reason i just mentioned a moment ago that i think it is ever evolving i think also event as times change we can look at other pieces of music as being part of the great american songbook and the great artist songbook is mainly music that has come from broadway and hollywood in the golden age and i say golden age and say that te twenty's thirty's and forty's but it does go further back and it does move which is that but those songs are connected to what we now call country western used to be called hillbilly and to race music and to blues and to jazz and to all the other forms and it's all interrelated so if my back is pressed to the wall i would describe the essential great american songbook as being from the t s through the nine hundred forty s but of course that's leaving out so many when i meet these young people that love the great american songbook it's because their parents or someone in their family or extended family has exposed them to it and i think that in spite of that the internet offers infinite possibilities unless somebody is there to lead the kids to  it it might not reach then i think one of the great problems in our world today is that the deprivation of arts funding and the deprivation of culture has created the climate and society in which we live which has created a political divide the likes of which none of us have ever seen and that is very clear and clearly to me because we have lost the common ground of the arts to give us something which we can share and look at another human being with whom we have differences and look at the common things that bond us together i think it's absolutely terrible that we don't have any it seems that anybody in the political system who is fighting to keep the arts a lot of forget about comment out of the amendment to the minnesota constitution that is before the people of the state that would define marriage as between one man and woman well some people may know that i married my partner terrence flannery four years ago in be able to marry out of my personal feeling is that everybody is entitled to rather opinion and this is america where we have a great freedom to to believe and do is wish and therefore i wish to also that people who wish to get married could have the right to do so without the interference of others how important is it to you to be true to the tune as written the top of the dynamics the phrasing as it appears they intended each when each piece was written by the gershwins verses rendering the particular piece in your own way your own liberties world and hence when they've created even richard rodgers who is legendary for having insisted that his songs be performed exactly as he wrote them only felt that way in the theatre with popular recordings he was much more liberal and i think that it is essential to be able to take certain liberties with the songs because they keep them alive but i think it really is a matter of taste like i don't like it where people sometimes change the lyrics where it will change the meaning of the that's how they wrote now after george died it was recorded for the first time it had never been recorded by lee wiley who did it is a ballad and frank sinatra heard that particular recording and he decided to record it in one nine hundred forty eight twenty years after it was written and those twenty years later sinatra sang it is a very language beautiful romantic thing and when i rehearsed her that recording he was so perplexed and warranted because he wrote those words to be sung fast i've got a crush  sweetie and when he heard them slow at first he didn't like it and then he realized that interpretively the song worked much better as a ballad and it also became one of the most popular songs that he ever wrote twenty years after  thank you for that impromptu piece from the younger years of your life were influenced by the gershwins and you describe that surely you haven't stopped being influenced who is influencing your music today there are many influences in the world and one of the things i love about being alive today is that we have everything that came before we live in a time in which the last hundred years spawns technology that makes this possible to experience so much fun has been preserved with the today's artists there are certain singers i enjoyed listening to catherine russell i instrument and turn it into one of the means by which he performs this virtuous of music and it just continues to show me how the simplest disturbance of the simplest  one final question that music does something to us and for us with us as a people as individuals can you speak about where you find hope or over a positive sense of the future i see music physically heal people in that i've played convalescent homes in the also rans wards of different facilities were people literally wake up who have been disconnected and you can see headphones and literally came back and started talking and conversing and was reconnected music i think is one of the greatest gifts we have in our world because it changes the state of mind it opens up the possibility of achievement in life it can access to other people and i think it is one of the things that can save us in a time where there appears to be very little else that can possibly be of celebration i think it is extraordinarily important to keep using our minds and whatever way we can to share it and also to keep music as a communal experience because the solitary experience of this into music is not the way most music was listen for most of the time and to have gatherings where people communally share and make music together and listen to music to listen to the choir in church gives us a communal experience that with the power of numbers gives us the hope that we can go out and make the world a better place th