On Friday, July 21st, 2023, TONY BENNETT, well-known as both a singer and a painter, passed away in his hometown of New York City at the age of 96. His publicist Sylvia Weiner verified this news to the Associated Press. Bennett’s cause of death was not disclosed, though he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2016. He is survived by his wife, Susan, his four children—Johanna, Antonia, Danny, and Dae—as well as nine grandchildren.
Tony Bennett was born on the 3rd of August, 1926 in New York City. His unique style of singing, along with his friendly persona and his approach to musical standards, enabled him to share the American songbook across the world and gain an influx of new admirers even in his later years. After learning of his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2016, Bennett persevered in his performing and recording. His last album, “Love for Sale” was released in 2021 and featured duets with Lady Gaga on the title song, as well as other pieces by Porter. Furthermore, Bennett and Lady Gaga performed together at Radio City Music Hall in August 2021, in a show entitled “One Last Time” – which was to be his last public performance.
Tony Bennett’s career of over 7 decades was impressive not only for its length, but also for its consistency. He put on hundreds of concerts and club dates and recorded 150+ albums, all dedicated to keeping alive the classic American popular song genre; written by the likes of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and others. As one of the last great saloon singers of the mid-20th century, Bennett’s aim was to develop a hit catalog instead of hit records. He put out more than 70 albums and was awarded 19 Grammys, the majority of which he achieved after he turned 60. Adored by both fans and fellow musicians, Bennett made the music do the talking, interpreting songs written by the greats like Gershwins and Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern. Unlike his friend and mentor Frank Sinatra, he was more prone to interpret a song instead of embodying it. Although his singing and public life weren’t as dramatic as Sinatra’s, Bennett’s easy, courtly manner and uncommonly strong and enduring voice (which he described as “a tenor who sings like a baritone”) allowed him to deliver a heartfelt ballad or bring life to an up-tempo number.
“I enjoy entertaining the audience, making them forget their problems,” he told The Associated Press in 2006. “I think people … are touched if they hear something that’s sincere and honest and maybe has a little sense of humor. … I just like to make people feel good when I perform.”
Bennett was praised often by his peers, but never more meaningfully than by what Sinatra said in a 1965 Life magazine interview: “For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”
Tony Bennett endured the rise of rock music with such strength that he even gained new devotees and partners, some of whom were young enough to be his grandchildren. Three years before 2014, when Bennett was 88, he achieved a #1 Billboard 200 album with “Duets II,” which included superstars like Lady Gaga, Carrie Underwood, and Amy Winehouse, who gave her last studio recording for the project. This relationship with Winehouse was depicted in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Amy,” which featured a scene of Bennett’s uplifting support to the not-so-confident young vocalist as she sang “Body and Soul.” Bennett’s ability to transition seamlessly between pop and jazz made him a perfect ambassador for introducing the Great American Songbook to new fans.
“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. Those songs will never die.”
Ironically, his most famous contribution came through two unknowns, George Cory and Douglass Cross, who in the early ’60s provided Bennett with his signature song at a time his career was in a lull. They gave Bennett’s musical director, pianist Ralph Sharon, some sheet music that he stuck in a dresser drawer and forgot about until he was packing for a tour that included a stop in San Francisco.
“Ralph saw some sheet music in his shirt drawer … and on top of the pile was a song called ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco.’ Ralph thought it would be good material for San Francisco,” Bennett said. “We were rehearsing and the bartender in the club in Little Rock, Arkansas, said, ‘If you record that song, I’m going to be the first to buy it.’”
By the time he had reached his sixties, Tony Bennett’s popularity seemed to have waned. However, he and his son and manager, Danny, found creative ways to target the MTV Generation. He made his presence known on late night talk shows, as well as “The Simpsons”. In 1993, Bennett even presented alongside the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the MTV Music Video Awards, and his own video of “Steppin’ Out With My Baby” was featured on MTV’s “Buzz Bin”. This led to an invitation to do an episode of “MTV Unplugged”, joined by Elvis Costello and k.d. lang. The performance from this episode resulted in the album “Tony Bennett: MTV Unplugged” and earned Bennett two Grammys, one of which was Album of the Year.
Tony Bennett won Grammys for his salutes to female vocalists (“Here’s to the Ladies”), Billie Holiday (“Tony Bennett on Holiday”) and Duke Ellington (“Bennett Sings Ellington – Hot & Cool”). He also earned awards for his collaborations with other singers: “Playin’ With My Friends – Bennett Sings the Blues” and his Louis Armstrong tribute “A Wonderful World” with k.d. lang, which was the first full album he had ever recorded with another artist. He commemorated his 80th birthday with “Duets: An American Classic,” which featured Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder among others. Bennett shared with the AP in 2006 that “they’re all giants in the industry, and all of a sudden they’re saying to me ‘You’re the master.'” Though he was long associated with San Francisco, the singer acknowledged that his real home was Astoria, the working-class area in the New York City borough of Queens, where he was born as Anthony Dominick Benedetto during the Great Depression. In 2001, Bennett and his third wife, Susan Crow Benedetto, who was a former teacher, established the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a “Fame”-style public high school, in his old neighborhood.
The high school student had to abandon his studies in commercial art in order to help support his family. He got a job as a copy boy for the Associated Press, sang as a waiter at social events, and participated in local amateur shows. During World War II, he enlisted in the combat infantry and served as a librarian for the Armed Forces Network. His initial recording was a 1946 air check of the blues tune “St. James Infirmary” from Armed Forces Radio. Taking advantage of the GI Bill, he attended the American Theater Wing, later called the Actors Studio. The acting lessons he took there taught him to express himself better and hone his story-telling skills. He also studied the Bel Canto vocal style which enabled him to extend the extent of his vocal range. He took to heart the advice of his vocal coach, Miriam Spier.
“She said please don’t imitate other singers because you’ll just be one of the chorus whoever you imitate whether it’s Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra and won’t develop an original sound,” Bennett recalled in the 2006 AP interview. “She said imitate musicians that you like, find out how they phrase. I was particularly influenced by the jazz musicians like (pianist) Art Tatum and (saxophonists) Lester Young and Stan Getz.”
In 1947, Bennett made his first recording, the Gershwins’ standard “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” for a small label under the stage name Joe Bari. The following year he gained notice when he finished behind Rosemary Clooney on the radio show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” Bennett’s big break came in 1949 when singer Pearl Bailey invited him to join her revue at a Greenwich Village club. Bob Hope dropped by one night and was so impressed that he offered the young singer a spot opening his shows at the famed Paramount Theater, where teens had swooned for Sinatra. But the comedian didn’t care for his stage name and thought his real name was too long for the marquee.
“He thought for a moment, then he said, ‘We’ll call you Tony Bennett,’” the singer wrote in his autobiography, “The Good Life,” published in 1998.
In 1950, Mitch Miller, the leader of Columbia Records’ pop single division, recruited Bennett and released the single “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” which had some success. He was close to being dropped from the label the following year until “Because of You” hit #1 on the pop charts. Other successful songs followed, such as “Rags to Riches,” “Blue Velvet,” and Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart,” which was the first country tune to become an international pop hit. Miller was intent on having Bennett sing more Sinatra-style ballads and novelty songs, but Bennett capitalized on the new LP album format starting in 1955 with “Cloud 7,” which included a small jazz combo led by guitarist Chuck Wayne. He also reached out to the jazz audience with albums like “The Beat of My Heart” (1957) with jazz percussion masters Chico Hamilton and Art Blakey, as well as being the first white male singer to record with the Count Basie Orchestra in 1958. Frank Sinatra would later do the same. Given his friendship with Black musicians and his outrage at the racial prejudice he encountered in the army, he wholeheartedly supported the Civil Rights Movement. He responded to Harry Belafonte’s invitation to join Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march and perform for the protesters.
In the 1960s, Bennett’s career reached its peak when he released “San Francisco” and became the first male pop solo musician to headline at Carnegie Hall, with a live album of the 1962 show. In 1966, he put out “The Movie Song Album”, which included Johnny Mandel’s Oscar-winning song “The Shadow of Your Smile” and “Maybe September”, the theme song from the unsuccessful “The Oscar” which marked the singer’s only movie-acting role. As rock music became more popular than traditional pop, Bennett and Columbia label head Clive Davis had a disagreement over the album “Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today” which featured songs such as “MacArthur Park” and “Little Green Apples”. Consequently, Bennett quit Columbia in 1972 and started his own label, Improv, which produced two jazz-classic duet albums with the pianist Bill Evans during 1975-76. Alongside his artistic successes, Improv financially failed Bennett and he experienced troubles in his personal life, such as the breakup of his marriage to Patricia Beech in 1971 and with Sandra Grant in 1984. His debts almost brought him to bankruptcy and the IRS was trying to take his Los Angeles house. After a near-fatal drug overdose in 1979, his son Danny became his manager and helped Bennett overcome his substance addiction and sort out his finances. He moved back to New York City and resumed doing more than 200 live performances per year.
In 2005, Bennett was honored as a Kennedy Center Honoree and in 2006, he received the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Award. Additionally, he earned two Emmy Awards for “Tony Bennett Live By Request: A Valentine Special” (1996) and “Tony Bennett: An American Classic” (2007). As Bennett wrote in “The Good Life” (1998) with Will Friedwald, he was determined to perform songs that connected with people. In addition to singing, he also pursued his passion for painting by taking art classes and bringing his sketchbook on tour. His paintings, signed with his Benedetto, were featured in various public and private collections, such as the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. Describing his creative life to the AP in 2006, Bennett explained, “I love to paint as much as I love to sing. It worked out to be such a blessing in my life because if I started feeling burnt-out singing…I would go to my painting and that’s a big lift. So I stay in this creative zone all the time.”
The post On Friday, July 21st, 2023, TONY BENNETT passed away in his hometown of New York City appeared first on NSF - Magazine.