Fascinating Rhythms : Feinstein Resurrects Long-Unheard Gershwin Tunes

“SWNDRFL” reads the license plate on a car parked outside a Hollywood recording studio this week.

The car belongs to singer-pianist Michael Feinstein and the plate, with a few vowels added, translates into “ ‘S Wonderful”--one of the most effervescently buoyant of George and Ira Gershwin’s songs, and an ideal symbol for a session devoted to expanding the remarkable Gershwin legacy unheard for more than 50 years.

Jammed inside Group IV Recording’s largest studio is a group of musicians surrounded by a maze of microphones, baffles, wires and music stands.

Among them are some of Los Angeles’ finest players--woodwind specialist Ray Pizzi, cracking jokes with his usual offbeat whimsy; bassist John Clayton, wearing a set of headphones as he studies his part, and pianist Tom Rainer, breaking up the tension by playing hilarious, between-take musical quotes.

Standing calmly alongside the conductor’s podium, a slight smile on his boyish face, is the object of all this regulated chaos. Barely five years after he was transformed, almost overnight, from Ira Gershwin’s studious assistant to a cabaret attraction, then a Broadway star of the first magnitude, the thirtysomething Feinstein can now command major - league-sized projects.

And this is a major-league project: An album of previously unpublished and unchronicled songs by the Gershwins. The album--expected next spring from Elektra/Nonesuch Records--will feature more than 20 tracks, with entries dating from 1919 to 1937, sung by Feinstein and backed by a full orchestra.

Typically, Feinstein has disdained the tedious but standard multi-track, overdubbing process for the production.

“When I run in to other people in the recording business,” he explains, “and they ask how long I’m going to be recording, I say, ‘A week.’ And they give me a look and say, ‘A week? You’re doing a record in a week?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, a week. We get the orchestra; I sing the songs; we fix whatever needs to be fixed and that’s it.’

But the procedure is easier in the telling than in the doing. The taping of “The Luckiest Man in the World,” for example, which was written and cut from a show called “Pardon My English,” keeps hitting little snags.

In the control room, several engineers, assorted acquaintances and producers Tommy Krasker and John McClure wait while conductor Rob Fisher tries to find some elusive wrong notes.

In the studio, Feinstein watches patiently as Fisher takes the woodwinds through a tricky passage in the score--a vintage, 1933 arrangement by the late Broadway orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett. The passage doesn’t want to work. Feinstein finally turns toward the glass window of the control room, a twinkle in his eye, and asks, “Can somebody put in a call to Robert Russell Bennett?”

Ever quick on the take, McClure pushes the button on his talk-back microphone and replies, “We’ll fax St. Peter right away.”

Despite the light and easy spontaneity in the studio, the session has not been an overnight enterprise. Feinstein and Tommy Krasker, who works with Lenore Gershwin, Ira’s widow, have been planning the production of the largely unfamiliar Gershwin material for years.

“Shortly after I met Ira in 1977, I started going through these songs,” Feinstein explains. “Some of them had actually been used. In 1946, he fashioned a film score called ‘The Shocking Miss Pilgrim,’ which was made of completely posthumous melodies.

For the most part, the songs were dropped from shows like “Lady Be Good,” “Strike Up the Band” and “Funny Face” for a variety of reasons that had very little to do with their quality.

“I’m not recording anything that I don’t feel is good,” continues Feinstein. “These are not all songs that were dropped from shows. Many were used but not published at the time, because they weren’t considered songs that could become ‘popular successes.’ And, sometimes, the shows just died and the songs disappeared.

“ ‘Anything for You,’ for example, is from a 1921 show called ‘A Dangerous Maid,’ the first by George and Ira together, and a huge flop. ‘Anything for You’ didn’t turn up until about two years ago, when it was found in a barn in New Hampshire that belonged to the heirs of one of the producers of the original show.”

Feinstein’s encyclopedic knowledge about the Gershwin oeuvre has not prevented him, as a performer, from taking liberties with the material. Never strictly an antiquary, he is a firm believer in allowing the music to find a contemporary audience.

“I’m taking great liberties with some of the pieces,” he says, “because I realized that they just wouldn’t work in their original settings. One number, ‘Somebody Stole My Heart Away,’ a kind of bouncy little Western piece is, in its original form, a terrible song. And if Ira were here, he would tell you the same thing.

“When we went through the material everybody said, ‘Oh, let’s forget that song.’ But I tried playing around with it at the piano, slowed it down, changed the chords a little bit and, as a ballad, it’s become a special number.”

Feinstein’s vocals are done “live” with the orchestra, from a small cubicle--called a booth--where he can see both Fisher and McClure. As he sings “The Luckiest Man in the World,” his husky voice soaring over the rich ensemble sounds, a young woman, Sharon Gerber, stands nearby, listening. Occasionally, she raises one hand, palm up, and holds it in a receptive position.

What, exactly, is she doing? Directing Feinstein’s interpretation? Channeling Gershwin energy? No one seems to know.

The answer, says Feinstein with a chuckle, may be a bit of all three. “Sharon does energy balancing and healing,” he explains. “She helps me to get my mind focused and my body relaxed. It really makes a difference.”

But the fun and games, the easy interaction between performers never get in the way of the serious work being done. Feinstein confesses to having been nervous on the initial day of production. “It was such a long time in coming,” he says with a sigh. “But today I feel great, because now I know it’s going to work.”

Asked if there was any single Gershwin line that might apply to the restoration of 20 of their songs, Feinstein thinks for a few moments, hums several prospective choices, rejects them, and finally replies: “Yes, I think there’s one.

“It’s what Ira once wrote in the book at the Library of Congress, and it’s a perfect description of the great body of work he and George have left behind: ‘Shining star and inspiration, worthy of a mighty nation.’ ”