At the Sinatra Centennial Celebration that took place at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts on October 24, Michael Feinstein expressed he wanted to pay tribute to someone who “has influenced every singer who came after him, whether they know it or not”. He was speaking about Ol’ Blue Eyes of course, but one could almost imagine decades from now, someone paying similar tribute to Mr. Feinstein. Like Sinatra, Feinstein has devoted his entire career to the preservation of the Great American Songbook, not through ceremonial worshipping, but through performance. He has invigorated the canon by making it feel malleable, fresh and alive.

Performing a setlist of numbers made famous by Sinatra, Feinstein showed off his stunning voice, which can go from being sweet like it sounded in “What Kind of Fool Am I?” to ominous and dangerously sexy as it sounded in “I Wanna Be Around”, a so-called song of revenge. As is his custom, Feinstein interspersed trivia and personal anecdotes in between songs. He spoke of of how he came up with a perfect plan to catch Sinatra’s attention, to being in parties with the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Mancini. He brought old school glamour to the procedure without making the performance feel stuffy, snobby or too detached. Feinstein knows how to cast a spell on his audience through sheer charm and song.

He opened his performance with a delightful mashup of “Luck Be a Lady” and “All I Really Need is the Girl” from Gypsy, and did a swoon-worthy performance of “Fly Me to the Moon” in the style preferred by its composer by Bart Howard, not a toe-tapping swing, but a melancholy waltz. Composers loved Sinatra so much that Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne wrote a song just for him, as a thanks for bringing them to Hollywood and opening up their career, the song in question was “Time After Time”, which contains the lyrics “I only know what I know/The passing years will show/You've kept my love so young, so new”, it’s almost as if the songs were speaking of both Sinatra and Feinstein.