Tony Bennett, In Memoriam

I’m sure you have heard the great singer, crooner Tony Bennett died on July 21^st.  He was 96 years old, and in recent years suffered from Alzheimer’s, diagnosed back in 2016.  Still he performed several times in recent years.  From the L.A. TimesObituary.  

 

Tony Bennett, the enduring New York City crooner who famously left his heart in San Francisco and melted hearts all over the world during his more than seven decades on the music scene, died Friday. He was 96, just two weeks short of his birthday.

His birthday was on August 3^rd, today, and the Federal government has declared in his honor to be Tony Bennett Day.  

I’m going to honor him with a few selections that captures his style and grace.  He had a lovely slow way of crooning, shown here in “When Joanna Loved Me.”  Notice the articulation and phrasing.  Just perfection.

 

 

From an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, “Stranger in Paradise.”  The pitch of the long  notes makes the song.

 

I think Bennett excelled in the jazzy pieces from the American songbook.  “The Best is Yet to Come” is probably more associated with Frank Sinatra but I think Bennett outs his personal stamp on it that makes it his own.

 

But if you think Bennett and Sinatra were rivals, Sinatra paid him the highest compliment.  From the obit:

“He excites me when I watch him — he moves me,” Sinatra said in a 1965 Life magazine article. “He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more. There’s a feeling in back of it.”

Tony had a special relationship with Lady Gaga in his later years.  Here he does a duet with her, “The Lady is a Tramp.”

 

This Irving Berlin song for me is the quintessential Tony Bennett song, jazzy, American, and with a hint of living a classy life.  I love his rendition of “Steppin Out With My Baby.”

 

There was something very American in Tony Bennett’s voice.  I can’t put my finger on it, but his voice just exudes an American.  Yes, he was an Italian-American, but his voice speaks of the melting pot of the big American city.

 

Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born Aug. 3, 1926, in Long Island City, N.Y., the third child of Giovanni Benedetto, a grocer, and his wife, Anna. He grew up in the working-class Astoria neighborhood of Queens, which Bennett once described as “a lot like a small Midwestern town.”

 

When he was 10, his father died and his mother struggled to maintain the family as a seamstress.

 

Always interested in singing, Bennett made his first public performance at 9 at a local political gathering, and by the time he was a teenager, he was performing in clubs as Joe Bari, a name he chose because he thought it sounded less ethnic. He attended the School of Industrial Arts in Manhattan, although he didn’t graduate. By 16, he was trying to make a living working as an elevator operator and a copy boy for the Associated Press, before breaking into show business as a singing waiter in Astoria.

From Astoria to perhaps the song of the city he is most known for, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

 

Finally, this rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” just blows me away.  This shows exactly what Frank Sinatra said in the quote above, Bennett captures exactly what the composer had in mind.

 

Somewhere over the rainbow, Tony Bennett now rests in eternal peace.  Thank you dear man.