Michael Feinstein performs at Ravinia Sept. 4, and later in the month his newest CD will be available.
Three-time Academy Award-winner Harry Warren ranks among the most prolific of 20th century American composers, writing such classic songs as ’42nd Street,’ ‘Lullaby of Broadway,’ ‘I Only Have Eyes for You,’ ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo,’ ‘Jeepers Creepers,’ and ‘On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.’ Unlike such peers as Porter, Berlin, and the Gershwins, however, his name is not universally recognized. That is now likely to change with the release of Hopeless Romantics, a new collaboration between the multi-Grammy nominee Michael Feinstein and jazz pianist George Shearing.
Vocalist and pianist Michael Feinstein has become the single most knowledgeable and dedicated musical anthropologist and archivist the Great American Songbook has ever known (a fact not lost on the Library of Congress, which recently elected Feinstein to the National Sound Recording Advisory Board, an organization dedicated to safeguarding America’s musical heritage). Over his three-decade long career, he has chronicled, catalogued, preserved, protected, and recorded the work of many Songbook masters. His admiration for Warren’s vast catalog began in the late 1970s, when Ira Gershwin, for whom Feinstein was working at the time, introduced him to the composer.