Courtesy
Michael Feinstein
Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Michael Feinstein is a one-of-a-kind entertainer and artist, an award-winning Broadway star, a stellar singer and pianist, and a steward of the Great American Songbook. He doesn’t perform frequently in Las Vegas — his first trip was at Steve Wynn’s newly opened Bellagio and it’s long-gone Fontana Room — but he’s here this week at his favorite local venue and ready to continue his mission: to share some music he loves with an appreciative audience.
“I’m lucky to do what I do, and I don’t take it for granted,” Feinstein said. “I truly help people keep music in their lives in whatever way they choose, because it makes the trip a little easier.”
Feinstein will perform “Because of You,” his tribute to Tony Bennett, backed by a 17-piece big band at Reynolds Hall at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available at thesmithcenter.com.
His motivation to perform Bennett’s classic tunes like “Rags to Riches,” “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and “I Get a Kick Out of You” is the same inspiration that informs his at-large musical endeavors.
“It’s because I don’t want Tony to be forgotten,” Feinstein said. “I don’t mean it to sound like I’m going to save Tony Bennett, but we will never have the gift of being able to see and hear him live again, and so much of what made Tony brilliant is that interaction and live experience. So it seemed like the right time to celebrate him in a personal way.”
Feinstein has been friends with Bennett, who died last year at age 96, and his wife Susan Crow, for a number of years and said the legendary singer was always very encouraging. “One day he sent me a package of his favorite throat lozenges imported from England,” Feinstein said. “So [this show] is personal, and it’s also putting in context the songs he sang, telling stories about Tony and evoking what it was that made him great, hopefully keeping it going.”
Bennett’s music — like that of Frank Sinatra, always comfortably at home in Las Vegas — is an essential piece of the canon of American music Feinstein works diligently to maintain. He founded the Great American Songbook Foundation in 2007, an organization that preserves that musical legacy through careful curation of performance artifacts, programming for the public, research opportunities for students and performers, and educational opportunities for young musicians developing their own love for the craft.
“It’s a great passion for me to keep the music alive, and that only happens by acquainting younger audiences with this body of work,” Feinstein said. “We do a number of things including the annual high school songbook academy, a weeklong program working with high school kids who may or may not be acquainted with this material.
“It’s so amazing to see young people so fresh in their musical evolution connect with jazz and all these songs, and it becomes another type of music they listen to and maybe perform next to the contemporary stuff they already hear.”
It’s personally important to this artist to preserve this part of our collective culture, but it’s also necessary for this type of programming to continue, he said, since music education has traditionally taken a back seat across the country.
“There has been no substantive musical education in most schools around America, and we have felt the effects of that through polarization, the red state and blue state divide,” he said. “That divide has been created in part due to the loss of common ground, and the arts is always something that is bringing us together where we can relate to others. It’s about finding what joins us as opposed to what separates us.”
