Tony Bennett, masterful stylist of American musical requirements, dies at 96

By Associated Press

NEW YORK: Tony Bennett, the eminent and timeless stylist whose devotion to traditional American songs and knack for creating new requirements reminiscent of”I Left My Heart In San Francisco” graced a decadeslong profession that introduced him admirers from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga, died Friday. He was 96, simply two weeks wanting his birthday.

Publicist Sylvia Weiner confirmed Bennett’s demise to The Associated Press, saying he died in his hometown of New York. There was no particular trigger, however Bennett had been recognized with Alzheimer’s illness in 2016.

The final of the good saloon singers of the mid-Twentieth century, Bennett typically stated his lifelong ambition was to create “a hit catalogue rather than hit records.” He launched greater than 70 albums, bringing him 19 aggressive Grammys — all however two after he reached his 60s — and loved deep and lasting affection from followers and fellow artists.

Bennett didn’t inform his personal story when performing; he let the music communicate as a substitute — the Gershwins and Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Unlike his good friend and mentor Sinatra, he would interpret a track quite than embody it. If his singing and public life lacked the excessive drama of Sinatra’s, Bennett appealed with a simple, courtly method and an uncommonly wealthy and sturdy voice — “A tenor who sings like a baritone,” he known as himself — that made him a grasp of caressing a ballad or brightening an up-tempo quantity.

“I enjoy entertaining the audience, making them forget their problems,” he informed 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 typically by his friends, however by no means extra meaningfully than by what Sinatra stated in a 1965 Life journal 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.”

He not solely survived the rise of rock music however endured so lengthy and so effectively that he gained new followers and collaborators, some younger sufficient to be his grandchildren. In 2014, at age 88, Bennett broke his personal document because the oldest dwelling performer with a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart for “Cheek to Cheek,”  his duets challenge with Lady Gaga. Three years earlier, he topped the charts with “Duets II,” that includes such modern stars as Gaga, Carrie Underwood and Amy Winehouse, in her final studio recording. His rapport with Winehouse was captured within the Oscar-nominated documentary “Amy,” which confirmed Bennett patiently encouraging the insecure younger singer by a efficiency of “Body and Soul.”

His remaining album, the 2021 launch “Love for Sale,” featured duets with Lady Gaga on the title observe, “Night and Day” and different Porter songs.

For Bennett, one of many few performers to maneuver simply between pop and jazz, such collaborations had been a part of his campaign to reveal new audiences to what he known as the Great American Songbook.

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

Ironically, his most well-known contribution got here by two unknowns, George Cory and Douglass Cross, who within the early ’60s supplied Bennett along with his signature track at a time his profession was in a lull. They gave Bennett’s musical director, pianist Ralph Sharon, some sheet music that he caught in a dresser drawer and forgot about till he was packing for a tour that included a cease 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 stated. “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.’”

Released in 1962 because the B-side of the one “Once Upon a Time,” the reflective ballad turned a grassroots phenomenon staying on the charts for greater than two years and incomes Bennett his first two Grammys, together with Record of the Year.

By his early 40s, he was seemingly out of trend. But after turning 60, an age when even the preferred artists typically accept simply pleasing their older followers, Bennett and his son and supervisor, Danny, discovered inventive methods to market the singer to the MTV Generation. He made visitor appearances on “Late Night with David Letterman” and have become a star visitor artist on “The Simpsons.” He wore a black T-shirt and sun shades as a presenter with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the 1993 MTV Music Video Awards, and his personal video of “Steppin’ Out With My Baby” from his Grammy-winning Fred Astaire tribute album ended up on MTV’s hip “Buzz Bin.”

That led to a proposal in 1994 to do an episode of “MTV Unplugged” with particular company Elvis Costello and okay.d. lang. The night’s efficiency resulted within the album, “Tony Bennett: MTV Unplugged,” which gained two Grammys, together with Album of the Year.

Bennett would win Grammys for his tributes to feminine vocalists (“Here’s to the Ladies”), Billie Holiday (“Tony Bennett on Holiday”), and Duke Ellington (“Bennett Sings Ellington — Hot & Cool”). He additionally gained Grammys for his collaborations with different singers: “Playin’ With My Friends — Bennett Sings the Blues,” and his Louis Armstrong tribute, “A Wonderful World” with Lang, the primary full album he had ever recorded with one other singer. He celebrated his eightieth birthday with “Duets: An American Classic,” that includes Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder amongst others.

“They’re all giants in the industry, and all of a sudden they’re saying to me ‘You’re the master,’” Bennett informed the AP in 2006.

Long related to San Francisco, Bennett would notice that his true house was Astoria, the working-class neighborhood within the New York City borough of Queens, the place he grew up in the course of the Great Depression. The singer selected his outdated neighbourhood as the location for the “Fame”-style public highschool, the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, that he and his third spouse, Susan Crow Benedetto, a former trainer, helped present in 2001.

The faculty will not be removed from the birthplace of the person who was as soon as Anthony Dominick Benedetto. His father was an Italian immigrant who impressed his love of singing, however he died when Anthony was 10. Bennett credited his mom, Anna, with instructing him a invaluable lesson as he watched her work from home, supporting her three youngsters as a seamstress doing piecework after his father died.

“We were very impoverished,” Bennett stated in a 2016 AP interview. “I saw her working and every once in a while she’d take a dress and throw it over her shoulder and she’d say, ‘Don’t have me work on a bad dress. I’ll only work on good dresses.’”

He studied business artwork in highschool however needed to drop out to assist assist his household. The teenager received a job as a copyboy for the AP carried out as a singing waiter and competed in beginner exhibits. A fight infantryman throughout World War II, he served as a librarian for the Armed Forces Network after the conflict and sang with a military large band in occupied Germany. His earliest recording is a 1946 air test from Armed Forces Radio of the blues “St. James Infirmary.”

Bennett took benefit of the GI Bill to attend the American Theater Wing, which later turned The Actors Studio. His performing classes helped him develop his phrasing and discover ways to inform a narrative. He realized the extra intimate Bel Canto vocal method which helped him maintain and lengthen the expressive vary of his voice. And he took to coronary heart the recommendation of his vocal coach, Miriam Spier.

“She said please don’t imitate other singers because you’ll just be one of the choruses whoever you imitate whether it’s Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra and won’t develop an original sound,” Bennett recalled within the 2006 AP interview. “She said to 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’ normal “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” for a small label underneath the stage identify Joe Bari. The following yr he gained discover when he completed behind Rosemary Clooney on the radio present “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” Bennett’s large break got here in 1949 when singer Pearl Bailey invited him to hitch her revue at a Greenwich Village membership. Bob Hope dropped by one evening and was so impressed that he provided the younger singer a spot opening his exhibits on the famed Paramount Theater, the place teenagers had swooned for Sinatra. But the comic didn’t look after his stage identify and thought his actual identify was too lengthy 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,” printed in 1998.

In 1950, Mitch Miller, the top of Columbia Records’ pop singles division, signed Bennett and launched the one, “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” a semi-hit. Bennett was on the verge of being dropped from the label in 1951 when he had his first No. 1 on the pop charts with “Because of You.” More hits adopted, together with “Rags to Riches,” “Blue Velvet,” and Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart,” the primary nation track to turn into a global pop hit.

Bennett discovered himself continuously clashing with Miller, who pushed him to sing Sinatra-style ballads and gimmicky novelty songs. But Bennett took benefit of the younger LP album format, beginning in 1955 with “Cloud 7,” that includes a small jazz combo led by guitarist Chuck Wayne. Bennett reached out to the jazz viewers with such modern albums because the 1957 “The Beat of My Heart,” an album of requirements that paired him with such jazz percussion masters as Chico Hamilton, and Art Blakey. He additionally turned the primary white male singer to document with the Count Basie Orchestra, releasing two albums in 1958. Sinatra would later do the identical.

Bennett’s friendship with Black musicians and his disgust on the racial prejudice he encountered within the Army led him to turn into an lively supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. He answered Harry Belafonte’s name to hitch Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march and carry out for the protesters.

Bennett’s early profession peaked within the Nineteen Sixties as he topped the charts with “San Francisco” and have become the primary male pop solo performer to headline at Carnegie Hall, releasing a dwell album of the 1962 live performance.

In 1966, he launched “The Movie Song Album,” a private favorite which featured Johnny Mandel’s Oscar-winning track “The Shadow of Your Smile” and “Maybe September,” the theme from the epic flop “The Oscar,” noteworthy as a result of it marked Bennett’s first and solely big-screen performing function.

But as rock continued to overhaul conventional pop, he clashed with Columbia label head Clive Davis, who insisted that the singer do the 1970 album “Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today,” with such songs as “MacArthur Park” and “Little Green Apples.” Bennett left Columbia in 1972 and went on to type his personal document label, Improv, which in 1975-76 produced two duet albums with the impressionistic pianist Bill Evans now thought of jazz classics.

Despite creative successes, Improv proved a monetary catastrophe for Bennett, who additionally confronted difficulties in his private life. His marriage to artist Patricia Beech collapsed in 1971. He wed actress Sandra Grant the identical yr, however that marriage resulted in 1984. With no recording offers, his money owed introduced him near chapter and the IRS was making an attempt to grab his home in Los Angeles. After a near-fatal drug overdose in 1979, he turned to his son, Danny, who ultimately signed on as his supervisor. Bennett kicked his drug behavior and received his funds so as, moved again to New York and resumed doing greater than 200 exhibits a yr.

He is survived by his spouse Susan, daughters Johanna and Antonia, sons Danny and Dae and 9 grandchildren.

Bennett was named a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2005 and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2006. He additionally gained two Emmy Awards — for “Tony Bennett Live By Request: A Valentine Special” (1996) and “Tony Bennett: An American Classic” (2007).

Besides singing, Bennett pursued his lifelong ardour for portray by taking artwork classes and bringing his sketchbook on the highway. His work, signed along with his household identify Benedetto — together with portraits of his musician mates and Central Park landscapes — had been displayed in private and non-private collections, together with the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

“I love to paint as much as I love to sing,” Bennett informed the AP in 2006. “It worked out to be such a blessing in my life because if I started getting 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.”

NEW YORK: Tony Bennett, the eminent and timeless stylist whose devotion to traditional American songs and knack for creating new requirements reminiscent of”I Left My Heart In San Francisco” graced a decadeslong profession that introduced him admirers from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga, died Friday. He was 96, simply two weeks wanting his birthday.

Publicist Sylvia Weiner confirmed Bennett’s demise to The Associated Press, saying he died in his hometown of New York. There was no particular trigger, however Bennett had been recognized with Alzheimer’s illness in 2016.

The final of the good saloon singers of the mid-Twentieth century, Bennett typically stated his lifelong ambition was to create “a hit catalogue rather than hit records.” He launched greater than 70 albums, bringing him 19 aggressive Grammys — all however two after he reached his 60s — and loved deep and lasting affection from followers and fellow artists.googletag.cmd.push(operate() googletag.show(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); );

Bennett didn’t inform his personal story when performing; he let the music communicate as a substitute — the Gershwins and Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Unlike his good friend and mentor Sinatra, he would interpret a track quite than embody it. If his singing and public life lacked the excessive drama of Sinatra’s, Bennett appealed with a simple, courtly method and an uncommonly wealthy and sturdy voice — “A tenor who sings like a baritone,” he known as himself — that made him a grasp of caressing a ballad or brightening an up-tempo quantity.

“I enjoy entertaining the audience, making them forget their problems,” he informed 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 typically by his friends, however by no means extra meaningfully than by what Sinatra stated in a 1965 Life journal 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.”

He not solely survived the rise of rock music however endured so lengthy and so effectively that he gained new followers and collaborators, some younger sufficient to be his grandchildren. In 2014, at age 88, Bennett broke his personal document because the oldest dwelling performer with a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart for “Cheek to Cheek,”  his duets challenge with Lady Gaga. Three years earlier, he topped the charts with “Duets II,” that includes such modern stars as Gaga, Carrie Underwood and Amy Winehouse, in her final studio recording. His rapport with Winehouse was captured within the Oscar-nominated documentary “Amy,” which confirmed Bennett patiently encouraging the insecure younger singer by a efficiency of “Body and Soul.”

His remaining album, the 2021 launch “Love for Sale,” featured duets with Lady Gaga on the title observe, “Night and Day” and different Porter songs.

For Bennett, one of many few performers to maneuver simply between pop and jazz, such collaborations had been a part of his campaign to reveal new audiences to what he known as the Great American Songbook.

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

Ironically, his most well-known contribution got here by two unknowns, George Cory and Douglass Cross, who within the early ’60s supplied Bennett along with his signature track at a time his profession was in a lull. They gave Bennett’s musical director, pianist Ralph Sharon, some sheet music that he caught in a dresser drawer and forgot about till he was packing for a tour that included a cease 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 stated. “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.’”

Released in 1962 because the B-side of the one “Once Upon a Time,” the reflective ballad turned a grassroots phenomenon staying on the charts for greater than two years and incomes Bennett his first two Grammys, together with Record of the Year.

By his early 40s, he was seemingly out of trend. But after turning 60, an age when even the preferred artists typically accept simply pleasing their older followers, Bennett and his son and supervisor, Danny, discovered inventive methods to market the singer to the MTV Generation. He made visitor appearances on “Late Night with David Letterman” and have become a star visitor artist on “The Simpsons.” He wore a black T-shirt and sun shades as a presenter with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the 1993 MTV Music Video Awards, and his personal video of “Steppin’ Out With My Baby” from his Grammy-winning Fred Astaire tribute album ended up on MTV’s hip “Buzz Bin.”

That led to a proposal in 1994 to do an episode of “MTV Unplugged” with particular company Elvis Costello and okay.d. lang. The night’s efficiency resulted within the album, “Tony Bennett: MTV Unplugged,” which gained two Grammys, together with Album of the Year.

Bennett would win Grammys for his tributes to feminine vocalists (“Here’s to the Ladies”), Billie Holiday (“Tony Bennett on Holiday”), and Duke Ellington (“Bennett Sings Ellington — Hot & Cool”). He additionally gained Grammys for his collaborations with different singers: “Playin’ With My Friends — Bennett Sings the Blues,” and his Louis Armstrong tribute, “A Wonderful World” with Lang, the primary full album he had ever recorded with one other singer. He celebrated his eightieth birthday with “Duets: An American Classic,” that includes Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder amongst others.

“They’re all giants in the industry, and all of a sudden they’re saying to me ‘You’re the master,’” Bennett informed the AP in 2006.

Long related to San Francisco, Bennett would notice that his true house was Astoria, the working-class neighborhood within the New York City borough of Queens, the place he grew up in the course of the Great Depression. The singer selected his outdated neighbourhood as the location for the “Fame”-style public highschool, the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, that he and his third spouse, Susan Crow Benedetto, a former trainer, helped present in 2001.

The faculty will not be removed from the birthplace of the person who was as soon as Anthony Dominick Benedetto. His father was an Italian immigrant who impressed his love of singing, however he died when Anthony was 10. Bennett credited his mom, Anna, with instructing him a invaluable lesson as he watched her work from home, supporting her three youngsters as a seamstress doing piecework after his father died.

“We were very impoverished,” Bennett stated in a 2016 AP interview. “I saw her working and every once in a while she’d take a dress and throw it over her shoulder and she’d say, ‘Don’t have me work on a bad dress. I’ll only work on good dresses.’”

He studied business artwork in highschool however needed to drop out to assist assist his household. The teenager received a job as a copyboy for the AP carried out as a singing waiter and competed in beginner exhibits. A fight infantryman throughout World War II, he served as a librarian for the Armed Forces Network after the conflict and sang with a military large band in occupied Germany. His earliest recording is a 1946 air test from Armed Forces Radio of the blues “St. James Infirmary.”

Bennett took benefit of the GI Bill to attend the American Theater Wing, which later turned The Actors Studio. His performing classes helped him develop his phrasing and discover ways to inform a narrative. He realized the extra intimate Bel Canto vocal method which helped him maintain and lengthen the expressive vary of his voice. And he took to coronary heart the recommendation of his vocal coach, Miriam Spier.

“She said please don’t imitate other singers because you’ll just be one of the choruses whoever you imitate whether it’s Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra and won’t develop an original sound,” Bennett recalled within the 2006 AP interview. “She said to 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’ normal “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” for a small label underneath the stage identify Joe Bari. The following yr he gained discover when he completed behind Rosemary Clooney on the radio present “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” Bennett’s large break got here in 1949 when singer Pearl Bailey invited him to hitch her revue at a Greenwich Village membership. Bob Hope dropped by one evening and was so impressed that he provided the younger singer a spot opening his exhibits on the famed Paramount Theater, the place teenagers had swooned for Sinatra. But the comic didn’t look after his stage identify and thought his actual identify was too lengthy 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,” printed in 1998.

In 1950, Mitch Miller, the top of Columbia Records’ pop singles division, signed Bennett and launched the one, “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” a semi-hit. Bennett was on the verge of being dropped from the label in 1951 when he had his first No. 1 on the pop charts with “Because of You.” More hits adopted, together with “Rags to Riches,” “Blue Velvet,” and Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart,” the primary nation track to turn into a global pop hit.

Bennett discovered himself continuously clashing with Miller, who pushed him to sing Sinatra-style ballads and gimmicky novelty songs. But Bennett took benefit of the younger LP album format, beginning in 1955 with “Cloud 7,” that includes a small jazz combo led by guitarist Chuck Wayne. Bennett reached out to the jazz viewers with such modern albums because the 1957 “The Beat of My Heart,” an album of requirements that paired him with such jazz percussion masters as Chico Hamilton, and Art Blakey. He additionally turned the primary white male singer to document with the Count Basie Orchestra, releasing two albums in 1958. Sinatra would later do the identical.

Bennett’s friendship with Black musicians and his disgust on the racial prejudice he encountered within the Army led him to turn into an lively supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. He answered Harry Belafonte’s name to hitch Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march and carry out for the protesters.

Bennett’s early profession peaked within the Nineteen Sixties as he topped the charts with “San Francisco” and have become the primary male pop solo performer to headline at Carnegie Hall, releasing a dwell album of the 1962 live performance.

In 1966, he launched “The Movie Song Album,” a private favorite which featured Johnny Mandel’s Oscar-winning track “The Shadow of Your Smile” and “Maybe September,” the theme from the epic flop “The Oscar,” noteworthy as a result of it marked Bennett’s first and solely big-screen performing function.

But as rock continued to overhaul conventional pop, he clashed with Columbia label head Clive Davis, who insisted that the singer do the 1970 album “Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today,” with such songs as “MacArthur Park” and “Little Green Apples.” Bennett left Columbia in 1972 and went on to type his personal document label, Improv, which in 1975-76 produced two duet albums with the impressionistic pianist Bill Evans now thought of jazz classics.

Despite creative successes, Improv proved a monetary catastrophe for Bennett, who additionally confronted difficulties in his private life. His marriage to artist Patricia Beech collapsed in 1971. He wed actress Sandra Grant the identical yr, however that marriage resulted in 1984. With no recording offers, his money owed introduced him near chapter and the IRS was making an attempt to grab his home in Los Angeles. After a near-fatal drug overdose in 1979, he turned to his son, Danny, who ultimately signed on as his supervisor. Bennett kicked his drug behavior and received his funds so as, moved again to New York and resumed doing greater than 200 exhibits a yr.

He is survived by his spouse Susan, daughters Johanna and Antonia, sons Danny and Dae and 9 grandchildren.

Bennett was named a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2005 and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2006. He additionally gained two Emmy Awards — for “Tony Bennett Live By Request: A Valentine Special” (1996) and “Tony Bennett: An American Classic” (2007).

Besides singing, Bennett pursued his lifelong ardour for portray by taking artwork classes and bringing his sketchbook on the highway. His work, signed along with his household identify Benedetto — together with portraits of his musician mates and Central Park landscapes — had been displayed in private and non-private collections, together with the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

“I love to paint as much as I love to sing,” Bennett informed the AP in 2006. “It worked out to be such a blessing in my life because if I started getting 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.”