Michael Jay Feinstein (born September 7, 1956) is an American singer, pianist, and music revivalist.  He is an interpreter of, and an anthropologist and archivist for, the repertoire known as the Great American Songbook. In 1988 he won a Drama Desk Special Award for celebrating American musical theatre songs. Feinstein is also a multi-platinum-selling, five-time Grammy-nominated recording artist.  He currently serves as Artistic Director for The Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel, Indiana.  Feinstein was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Florence Mazie (née Cohen), an amateur tap dancer, and Edward Feinstein, a sales executive for the Sara Lee Corporation and a former amateur singer.  At the age of five, he studied piano for a couple of months until his teacher became angered that he wasn't reading the sheet music she gave him, since he was more comfortable playing by ear.  As his mother saw no problem with her son's method, she took him out of lessons and allowed him to enjoy music his own way.  After graduating from high school, Feinstein worked in local piano bars for two years, moving to Los Angeles when he was 20.  Through the widow of legendary concert pianist-actor Oscar Levant, in 1977 he was introduced to Ira Gershwin, who hired him to catalogue his extensive collection of phonograph records.  The assignment led to six years of researching, cataloguing and preserving the unpublished sheet music and rare recordings in Gershwin's home, thus securing the legacy of not just Ira but also that of his composer brother George Gershwin, who had died four decades earlier.  Feinstein's extended tenure enabled him to also get to know Gershwin's next-door neighbor, singer Rosemary Clooney, with whom Feinstein formed an intensely close friendship lasting until Clooney's death.  Feinstein served as musical consultant for the 1983 Broadway show My One and Only, a musical pastiche of Gershwin tunes.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Feinstein

Quotes by Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)  

Never cut what you can untie.

To teach is to learn twice.
See more quotes at:  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/joseph_joubert.html

Since 2010 an Afghan music scholar trained in Australia, aided by a Juilliard-educated violinist and with government backing, has kept a small music school going in Kabul, putting musical instruments into the hands of street kids and striving to make space for girls in a country where education is often denied them.  The very existence of the school, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, is a significant achievement.  Now it is sending a group of youngsters, ages 9 to 21, to the United States for a 13-day tour.  They arrive Feb. 3, with performances scheduled for the Kennedy Center in Washington (on Feb. 7) and Carnegie Hall (on Feb. 12), not to mention an ice-skating trip to Yonkers and a visit to “The Lion King” on Broadway.  “It’s the responsibility of a musician to defend the right of human beings everywhere to be musical and to express themselves through music,” said William Harvey, the American violinist who is the conductor of the school’s Afghanistan Youth Orchestra.  “We’re celebrating a victory: the return of music.”  The 48 Afghan students on the tour will perform in traditional ensembles and in a Western-style orchestra in tandem with players from the Maryland Classic Youth Orchestra and the Scarsdale High School Orchestra, which helped raise money for the tour.  The Afghans will also play at the State Department, the Italian Embassy and the World Bank.  They will stay together in hotels, traveling under the eyes of security guards.  United States Embassy officials here have warned the students not to abscond.  The organizers say the tour has special significance in a country so marked by violence and misery.  “We are taking the message of peace and stability to the international community to show what a positive change has occurred,” said the school’s founder and driving force, Ahmad Sarmast, who has a Ph.D. in music from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.  Yet worries linger.  Music in Afghanistan still draws strident censure from the many conservative mullahs, who insist that it is un-Islamic.  And once the American military withdraws next year, the school’s existence could become precarious if such conservative forces come to power.   Alissa J. Rubin  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/arts/music/afghanistan-national-institute-of-music-students-to-tour-us.html?hpw 

Stefan Kudelski, the inventor of the first professional-quality portable tape recorder, which revolutionized Hollywood moviemaking and vastly expanded the reach of documentarians, independent filmmakers and eavesdroppers on both sides in the cold war, died Jan. 26 in Switzerland.  He was 83.  The Polish-born Mr. Kudelski was an engineering student at a Swiss university in 1951 when he patented his first portable recording device, the Nagra I, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, about the size of a shoe box and weighing 11 pounds, that produced sound as good as that of most studio recorders, which were phone-booth-size.  Radio stations in Switzerland were his first customers.  The bigger breakthrough came seven years later, when Mr. Kudelski introduced a high-quality tape recorder that could synchronize sound with the frames on a reel of film. Mr. Kudelski’s 1958 recorder, the Nagra III, weighed about 14 pounds and freed a new generation of filmmakers from the conventions and high cost of studio production.  Along with the newly developed portable 16-millimeter camera, the Nagra recorder became an essential tool for the on-location, often improvisational techniques of New Wave directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and American documentarians like D. A. Pennebaker, who used the Nagra to record the 1965 Bob Dylan tour featured in his classic film “Don’t Look Back,” released in 1967.  In various interviews, Mr. Pennebaker, Mr. Godard and Mr. Truffaut have all credited Mr. Kudelski with helping to make possible the informality and journalistic realism of their work.  Mr. Kudelski received Academy Awards for his technical contributions to filmmaking in 1965, 1977, 1978 and 1990, and Emmy Awards in 1984 and 1986.  Paul Vitello  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/business/stefan-kuldelski-inventor-of-the-nagra-dies-at-83.html?ref=obituaries&_r=0

The Royal Canadian Mint will no longer distribute the coin to financial institutions around the country, but it will remain legal tender.  The government has advised shop owners to round out prices to the nearest nickel (5p) for cash transactions.  Other countries that no longer use the penny include New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden.  Despite the change on Feb. 4, 2013, electronic transactions can still be billed to the nearest cent.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21328892 

Jan. 24, 2013  SACRAMENTO — Alarmed that pranksters have called 911 to report false emergencies at the homes of celebrities including Justin Bieber and Tom Cruise, two Southern California legislators have proposed laws to get tougher with anyone engaged in "swatting."  A bill announced Jan. 23 by state Sen. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) would allow longer sentences for and greater restitution from those convicted of making false reports to the police. Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca asked for the measure.  A similar proposal has been introduced by Assemblyman Mike Gatto (D-Los Angeles).  "The recent spate of phony reports to law enforcement officials that the home of an actor or singer is being robbed or held hostage is dangerous, and it's only a matter of time before there's a tragic accident," said Lieu.  Gatto and Lieu both propose that those convicted of making false 911 reports be liable for all costs associated with the police response.  Such pranks are "a complete waste of law enforcement resources," said Gatto.  http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/24/local/la-me-swatting-bill-20130124 

The Postal Service is expected to announce that it will stop delivering letters and other mail on Saturdays, but continue to handle packages, a move the financially struggling agency said would save about $2 billion annually as it looks for ways to cut cost.  The agency has long sought Congressional approval to end mail delivery on Saturdays.  But Congress, which continues to work on legislation to reform the agency, has resisted.  It is unclear how the agency will be able to end the six-day delivery of mail without Congressional approval.  News of the move was first reported by The Associated Press.  The announcement, which is expected at a Wednesday, Feb. 6  morning news conference, comes as the agency continues to lose money, mainly due to a 2006 law which requires it to pay about $5.5 billion a year into a future retiree health benefit fund.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us/postal-service-plans-to-end-saturday-delivery.html?_r=0