Tony Bennett, the eminent and timeless stylist whose devotion to classic American songs and a knack for creating new standards such as “I Left My Heart In San Francisco” graced a decades-long career that earned him admirers from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga, died Friday, July 21. He was 96 years old.
Publicist Sylvia Weiner confirmed Bennett’s death to The Associated Press, saying he died in his hometown of New York. There was no specific cause, but the American music legend had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016.
The last of the great saloon singers of the mid-20th century, Tony Bennett often said his lifelong ambition was to create “a hit catalog rather than hit records.” He has released more than 70 albums, earning him nineteen Grammys in competition – all but two after reaching his 60s – and enjoyed deep and lasting affection from fans and fellow artists.
“I just like to make people feel good when I play”
Tony Bennett didn’t tell his own story when he performed; instead, he let the music do the talking – The Gershwin and Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Unlike his friend and mentor Frank Sinatra, he performed a song rather than embodying it. While his singing and his public life lacked the dramatic intensity of Sinatra, Tony Bennett captivated with his ease, courteous manners and unusually rich and powerful voice, a grain that made him instantly recognizable – “a tenor who sings like a baritone”, as he himself said – which made him a master of the art of caressing a ballad or embellishing a faster number.
“I like to entertain the public, make them forget their problems,” he told The Associated Press in 2006. “I think people are touched if they hear something sincere and honest, maybe with a little humor. I just like to make people feel good when I play. »
Bennett was often praised by his peers, but never so significantly as by Sinatra, notably in a 1965 interview with Life magazine: “Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. It excites me when I watch it. It moves me. It’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a bit more. »
He survived the rock music boom so long and so well that he gained new fans and collaborators, some young enough to be his grandchildren. In 2014, at the age of 88, Tony Bennett broke his own record as the oldest living performer with a number 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart for “Cheek to Cheek”, his duet project with Lady Gaga.
A committed artist
Three years earlier, he had risen to the top of the charts with “Duets II”, which featured contemporary stars such as Lady Gaga, Carrie Underwood and Amy Winehouse, whose last studio recording it was. His relationship with Amy Winehouse was immortalized in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Amy”, which shows Tony Bennett patiently encouraging the insecure young singer during a rendition of “Body and Soul”.
He was also one of those white artists involved in the civil rights movement in the United States, notably by participating in 1965 in the marches in Alabama, but also by refusing to go and sing in South Africa at the time of apartheid.
Because of this national propensity to neglect talented artists, France shunned him for a long time to the point that it was not seen there until the mid-1990s, when it had revered Frank Sinatra. Distinguished jazz critics (there are some) have called him an “Italian-American wedding singer” or “a big fat Latin-Yankee variety.” Too bad for them, if many jazz greats have not had the same perception. Certainly, jazz was not the only perimeter in which he evolved but he was at ease there.
