Singer Tony Bennett dies aged 96

(New York) Legendary American singer Tony Bennett died on Friday, two weeks shy of his 97^e 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 century^e 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.

His last album, Love for Salereleased in 2021, included duets with Lady Gaga on the title track, Night and Day and other Porter songs.

For Bennett, one of the few performers to transition easily from pop to jazz, these collaborations are part of his crusade to expose new audiences to what he calls the Great American Songbook.

“No country has given the world such great music,” Bennett said in a 2015 interview with Downbeat magazine. Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern. These songs will never die. »

Ironically, his most famous contribution came from two unknowns, George Cory and Douglass Cross, who in the early ’60s provided Bennett with his signature song at a time when his career was on the wane. They gave Bennett’s musical director, pianist Ralph Sharon, some sheet music which he put away in a dresser drawer and forgot about until he packed up for a tour that included a stop in San Francisco.

Ralph saw sheet music in his file drawer…and on top of the pile was a song called “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.”

“Ralph thought it would be a good song for San Francisco,” Bennett said. We were rehearsing and the bartender at the club in Little Rock, Arkansas said to us, “If you record this song, I’ll be the first to buy it”. »

Released in 1962 on the B side of Once Upon a Timethis reflective ballad became a popular phenomenon, staying on the charts for over two years and earning Bennett his first two Grammys, including Record of the Year.

At the dawn of his forties, he was apparently out of fashion. But after hitting 60, an age when even the most popular artists are often content to please their older fans, Bennett and his son and manager, Danny, found creative ways to market the singer to the MTV generation.

He made appearances on the show Late Night with David Letterman and became a guest artist on the show The Simpsons. He wore a black t-shirt and sunglasses as a presenter with the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the 1993 MTV Music Video Awards, and his own video of Steppin’ Out With My Babyfrom his Grammy-winning Fred Astaire tribute album, ended up on the buzz bin plugged into MTV.

In 1994, he was asked to take part in an episode of MTV Unplugged with Elvis Costello and KD Lang as special guests. The evening’s performance resulted in the album Tony Bennett: MTV Unpluggedwhich won two Grammys, including Album of the Year.

Bennett won Grammys for his tributes to female singers (Here’s to the Ladies), to Billie Holiday (Tony Bennett on Holiday) and Duke Ellington (Bennett Sings Ellington-Hot & Cool). He has also won Grammys for his collaborations with other singers: Playin’ With My Friends – Bennett Sings the Blues and his tribute to Louis Armstrong, A Wonderful World with Lang, the first full album he ever recorded with someone else. He celebrated his 80^e birthday with Duets: An American Classicwith Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, among others.

“They’re all industry giants, and all of a sudden they’re like, ‘You’re the master,'” Bennett told the AP in 2006.

Long associated with San Francisco, Bennett noted that his true home was Astoria, the working-class community in the New York borough of Queens, where he grew up during the Great Depression. The singer chose his old neighborhood as the location for the “Fame”-style public high school, the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, which he helped found in 2001 with his third wife, Susan Crow Benedetto, a former teacher.

The school is not far from the birthplace of the man who was once called Anthony Dominick Benedetto. His father was an Italian immigrant who gave him a taste for singing, but died when Anthony was 10. Bennett credits his mother, Anna, for teaching him a valuable lesson watching her work from home, supporting her three children as a piecework seamstress after her father’s death.

“We were very poor,” Bennett said in a 2016 interview with the AP. I only work on good dresses”. »

He studied commercial art in high school, but had to drop out to help support his family. The teenager found a job as a copyist for the AP, performed as a singing waiter and took part in amateur shows. A combat infantryman during World War II, he served as a librarian for the armed forces network after the war and sang with an army big band in occupied Germany.

Bennett took advantage of the GI Bill to attend the American Theater Wing, which would later become the Actors Studio. His acting classes helped him develop his phrasing and learn how to tell a story. He learns the more intimate vocal technique of Bel Canto, which helps him sustain and extend the expressive range of his voice. And he took the advice of his vocal coach, Miriam Spier, to heart.

“She told me not to imitate other singers, because you’d just be one of the backing vocalists you’re imitating, whether it’s Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra, and you won’t develop an original sound,” Bennett recalled in the 2006 AP interview.

“She told me to imitate the musicians I love, to discover their way of phrasing. I was particularly influenced by jazz musicians like (pianist) Art Tatum and (saxophonists) Lester Young and Stan Getz. »

In 1947, Bennett recorded his first record, the standard Fascinatin’ Rhythm of the Gershwins, for a small record label under the stage name of Joe Bari. The following year, he made a name for himself by finishing behind Rosemary Clooney on the radio show Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.

Bennett rose to prominence in 1949 when singer Pearl Bailey invited him to join her revue at a club in Greenwich Village. Bob Hope spent an evening there and was so impressed that he asked the young singer to open for his shows at the famous Paramount Theater, where the teenagers had swooned in front of Sinatra. But the comedian doesn’t like his stage name and thinks his real name is too long for the marquee.

He thought for a while, then said, “We’ll call you Tony Bennett,” the singer wrote in his autobiography. The Good Lifepublished in 1998.

In 1950, Mitch Miller, head of the pop division of Columbia Records, signed a contract with Bennett and released the song. The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which is a semi-success. Bennett was on the verge of being kicked out of the record company in 1951 when he scored his first number 1 on the pop charts with Because of You. Other successes follow, including Rags to Riches, blue-velvet And Cold, Cold Heart by Hank Williams, the first country song to become an international pop hit.

Bennett reached out to jazz audiences with groundbreaking albums such as The Beat of My Heart (1957), an album of classics that associates him with masters of jazz percussion such as Chico Hamilton and Art Blakey. He also became the first white singer to record with Count Basie’s orchestra, releasing two albums in 1958. Sinatra would later do the same.