Tony Bennett 1926-2023

I must have been around 9 or 10 years old when I was allowed to play my parents records, including 45s on the black RCA 45 rpm player with the fat spindle.  Among my favorites was an extended play 45 on the Columbia label (which included an ad for Coca Cola) with six songs by Tony Bennett that included several of his first hits in the 1950s: “Because of You,” “Cold Cold Heart” and “From Rags to Riches,” along with other releases and B sides (“In the Middle of An Island,” “Come Next Spring” and “Can You Find It In Your Heart.”)  Judging from the wear on the record I played it a lot, and I certainly remember those first three hits.

 

If I knew Tony Bennett was Italian it would have seemed perfectly natural: many of the singers I heard on the radio or saw on TV in the 1950s were Italian-American, including some whose records had Italian titles and included lyrics in Italian.  We had some of those records, too, like Lou Monte’s comic songs mixing Italian and what he called “British,” and the 1953 hit “Eh, Cumpari,” in which Julius La Rosa introduces instruments of the orchestra in Italian (which was fitting, since the orchestra as we know it was invented in Italy.) 

 Another 1953 hit was Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore.” The trend reached its culmination in 1958 with a song entirely in Italian sung by an Italian artist (and composer) Domenico Modugno, that became an international number 1 hit with the title “Nel blu, dipinto di blu,” but has forevermore become known as “Volare” (and a hit under that title for Dean Martin and Robert Ridarelli, otherwise known as Bobby Rydell.)

 The Italian accented song was so popular in the 1950s that non-Italians like the Andrew Sisters, Eddie Fisher, Tony Martin and Vaughn Monroe (a local favorite as well as a big star who graduated from Jeannette High School) recorded them. My Italian grandmother had no problem accepting “Mambo Italiano” and “Come on a My House” sung by the blondish Irish beauty Rosemary Clooney. She wasn’t Anna Marie Alberghetti, but… 

Tony Bennett, often paired with Rosemary Clooney

 I remember Saturdays when we visited my grandparents, ending in the darkened living watching the Perry Como TV show.  It may have helped that Como was a local boy from Canonsburg, PA, the son of an Italian barber who had plied that trade before becoming a full-time singer.  He was part of the culture I’d been born into, when my grandparents conversed with their friends in Italian, and my mother, my uncle and my aunt spoke Italian with them especially when they didn’t want the grandchildren to know what they were saying.  I went to school with lots of Italian kids, a number of which I was somehow distantly related to.

 The 1950s were the Italian decade in music and American culture, especially if you include singers at the end of the decade and slightly beyond not usually associated with their Italian heritage, like Rydell, Dion DiMucci (Dion and the Belmonts), Connie Francis (who did record Italian favorites later in her career), Frankie Valli (of the Four Seasons) and Lou Christie (also a Pittsburgh area singer.)

 According to Mark Rotella in his book Amore: Italian American Song, more than 25 Italian singers made the hit parade between 1947 and 1954.  Even competing with early rock and roll, singers like Vic Damone and especially Perry Como had hits in later years.  I was very aware of Como's “Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes,” “Hot Diggity Dog Diggity” and “Round and Round” (a big hit in 1956), for example. 

  But it wasn’t just Italian voices or Italian language lyrics—many of their hits were based on Italian folk songs and opera. And they brought an Italian style to what became known as crooning.  That style was a combination of opera and “bel Canto,” or beautiful singing—a style that Frank Sinatra pioneered and others adopted, including Tony Bennett.

 In his 2012 book Life is a Gift, Bennett attributes some of his longevity to training in this style.  “The style emphasizes phrasing, pure, even tones, and a disciplined form of breath control.  It never fails to improve my voice.”

 “Bel canto teaches you to love every note that you sing,” he wrote.  “It’s the art of intimate singing; you’re singing into someone’s ear.”

 I remember hearing Tony Bennett’s 1962 hits “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and “I Want to Be Around” played often on the radio, competing with “Mash Potato Time” (the year’s Number 1) and “The Twist.”  After that I lost track of him, like a lot in my generation.  But he outlasted them all—well beyond the Italian crooner years into the second decade of the 21^st century.

 Apart from sheer longevity, he had other things going for him.  Bennett was drafted into the infantry in World War II, and after a scarring experience relieving soldiers who had fought in the traumatic Battle of the Bulge that turned him into a pacifist, he began singing with a U.S. Army orchestra put together to replace the one begun by Glenn Miller that ended with Miller’s disappearance in a light plane over the English Channel.  

He then used his G.I. Bill higher education benefits in an unusual way—he attended the American Theatre Wing, as did Harry Belafonte (the two became friends later.)  Bennett didn’t try to act professionally but applied what he’d learned about the Stanislavsky system to express the story within a song.  That subtle dramatic expressiveness was a key to his style. 

Another fascinating aspect of his life and career was his close relationships with black music and black performers, partly due to his love for jazz, and partly because he was just that kind of guy, with a multiethnic upbringing in the working class Bronx.  So while Bob Hope was instrumental in giving him an early break, so was Pearl Bailey.  Bennett was the first non-black singer to perform with Count Basie.  He toured with Lena Horne and was so close to Ella Fitzgerald that they and their families had Christmas together in Los Angeles every year that it was possible. Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were also close friends. Through Belafonte he got involved in supporting Martin Luther King and marched, not just in Washington but where it was really dangerous: in Selma, Alabama. 

with Lena Horne

His mentors (principally Frank Sinatra), seniors (Bing Crosby) and contemporaries all lauded the quality of his voice and his singing.  He was known as well as an all-around good guy.

 He had his career struggles: starting out as a singing waiter, then after success in the 1950s he ran up against the dominance of rock music that panicked record labels in the late 60s and 70s and ended the careers of most crooners. 

 He also faced at least one occasion of the prejudice against Italians that was also present throughout the 20^th century, even in the Italian decade and beyond it.  In the late 60s Bennett was in a meeting at Black Rock, the Columbia Records headquarters which was on the exact spot where his father had worked in his family’s grocery store, when he overheard an executive of his record company talking about him and saying, “We have got to get rid of that wop.”  (That prejudice still exists, when all Italians are equated with the Mafia, and a collection of the Italian decade songs is marketed as “Mob Hits.”)

  Bennett seemingly sidetracked himself at times, insisting on recording jazz albums as well as pop.  But in particular his two albums with pianist Bill Evans gave him credibility beyond the hit parade, helping him to outlast musical fashion.  His return to popularity came especially in the 1990s, including a hit performance on the MTV series Unplugged.

with Judy Garland

 Throughout his long career Bennett continued to perform in clubs and other venues, and continued his creative approach to recording.  So he was prepared for the happy accidents that so often define a career. In the late 1950s a pair of New York songwriters gave sheet music of some of their songs to Bennett’s accompanist, who stuck them in a dresser drawer and only found them two years later when he was gathering clothes for a tour.  Upcoming gigs included San Francisco and one of those songs named that city in its title, so he brought it along.

 Bennett sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” for the first time in San Francisco.  The response encouraged Columbia to ask him to record it for his next single.  It was supposed to just be the B side, so Bennett did it in one take.  Once released it slowly built to a major hit, winning a Gold Record, and becoming his signature song.   

When Tony Bennett died this summer at age 96, stories often lauded him as a champion of the Great American Songbook, a recent categorization of classic pre-rock songs.  That’s true but a bit antiseptic. Bennett favored songs that connected with his audience. Apart from their musical pleasure, you can imagine how such songs as “This Is All I Ask,”  “The Good Life” and “Who Can I Turn To” spoke directly to people out there in the dark, maybe nursing their last drink late at night. I imagine “This Is All I Ask” became particularly powerful as Bennett and his audience aged.

 But the wonder of his late career is his new audience, partly due to his jazz cred, and partly because he recorded duets with younger artists.   Like Sinatra in the 90s, Bennett in 2006 and 2011 made two albums of duets, and did so with the same producer (Phil Ramone, who’d produced Billy Joel.)  But there the resemblance ends. 

with Lady Gaga

 Sinatra’s voice had faded, and his duet partners recorded their parts at different times and places to Sinatra’s pre-recorded vocals.  Tony Bennett recorded live only with his duet partners singing with him in the room (they included Barbara Streisand, James Taylor, Celine Dion, Diana Krall, Paul McCartney, Sting, the Chicks, Elvis Costello, Juanes, Aretha Franklin, Amy Winehouse, Natalie Cole, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson and Lady Gaga, with whom he did subsequent albums.) Not only did he and those songs inspire excellent performances by his partners, but his  vocals on these reinterpretations of his own hits were thrilling and new.  “Because of You” was the first of his songs I knew, and his version with k.d. lang on Duets is singularly moving. 

   In the early 1950s Bennett was often paired with his young contemporary, Rosemary Clooney; he sang with Judy Garland in the early 60s, and ended his career on stage with Lady Gaga in 2021. 

Cary Grant evidently introducing Bennett to
Robert F. Kennedy

His friends included painter David Hockney, cellist Pablo Casals and poet Allen Ginsberg. For just about anyone else, the typical stories Tony Bennett told would be called name-dropping and humble-bragging.  But his sincerity was unquestioned.  And now we have irresistible tales of Cary Grant horsing around with Fred Astaire, or Astaire dancing alone to a song on the radio when he thought no one could see him. 

 Tony Bennett’s voice was strong and supple to the end. It could and did express a lifetime. There has  been no one like him, not for this long. May he rest in peace.  His work certainly lives on.