Legendary American singer Tony Bennett died on Friday, two weeks shy of his 97e anniversary.
Publicist Sylvia Weiner confirmed Bennett’s death to The Associated Press, saying he died in his hometown of New York. There is no specific cause, but the singer had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016.
Bennett leaves behind the memory of an eminent and timeless stylist whose devotion to classic American songs and a talent for creating new standards such as I Left My Heart In San Francisco have graced a decades-long career that has earned her admirers ranging from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga.
Last of the great charm singers of the mid-twentieth centurye century, Bennett often said that his lifelong ambition was to create “a hit catalog rather than hit records”. He’s released more than 70 albums, which have earned him 19 competing Grammys — all but two after he reached his 60s — and enjoyed deep and lasting affection from fans and fellow artists.
Bennett didn’t tell his own story when he performed; instead, he let the music do the talking—the Gershwins and Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Unlike his friend and mentor Sinatra, he was performing a song rather than embodying it.
While his singing and his public life lacked the dramatic intensity of Sinatra, Bennett appealed with his poise, courtly manners, and exceptionally rich, enduring voice—”a tenor that sings like a baritone,” he himself said—that made him a master of the caress of a ballad or the liveliness of a lively piece.
“I like to entertain the public, to make them forget their problems, he told the Associated Press in 2006. I think people are touched if they hear something sincere and honest, with maybe a little humor… I just like to make people feel good when I sing. »
Bennett has often been praised by his peers, but never so significantly as by Sinatra in an interview with the magazine Life in 1965: “To me, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the field. It excites me when I look at it. It moves me. It’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a bit more. »
He not only survived the rock music boom, but he endured so long and so well that he gained new fans and collaborators, some of whom are young enough to be his grandchildren.
In 2014, at the age of 88, Bennett broke his own record as the oldest living artist with a number 1 album on the Billboard 200 for Cheek to Cheekhis duet project with Lady Gaga.
Three years earlier, he had risen to the top of the charts with Duets IIwhich brought together contemporary stars such as Gaga, Carrie Underwood and Amy Winehouse, whose last studio recording it was.
His relationship with Amy Winehouse was immortalized in the documentary Amynominated for the Oscars, which shows Bennett patiently encouraging the insecure young singer during a performance of body and soul.
More details to come.