Tony Bennett, the eminent and timeless stylist whose devotion to classic American songs and knack for creating new standards, died Friday. He was 96, just two weeks short of his birthday.
Tony Bennett throws a kiss to the crowd at Ravinia in Highland Park on Saturday, August 18, 2012.
Bennett didn’t tell his own story when performing; he let the music speak instead — the Gershwins and Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Unlike his friend and mentor Sinatra, he would interpret a song rather than embody it.
For Bennett, one of the few performers to move easily between pop and jazz, such collaborations were part of his crusade to expose new audiences to what he called the Great American Songbook. By his early 40s, he was seemingly out of fashion. But after turning 60, an age when even the most popular artists often settle for just pleasing their older fans, Bennett and his son and manager, Danny, found creative ways to market the singer to the MTV Generation. He made guest appearances on “Late Night with David Letterman” and became a celebrity guest artist on “The Simpsons.
Long associated with San Francisco, Bennett would note that his true home was Astoria, the working-class community in the New York City borough of Queens, where he grew up during the Great Depression. The singer chose his old neighborhood as the site for the “Fame”-style public high school, the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, that he and his third wife, Susan Crow Benedetto, a former teacher, helped found in 2001.
“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 Art Tatum and Lester Young and Stan Getz.”
Bennett’s friendship with Black musicians and his disgust at the racial prejudice he encountered in the Army led him to become an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. He answered Harry Belafonte’s call to join Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march and perform for the protesters.
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Tony Bennett, masterful stylist of American musical standards, dies at 96Tony Bennett, the eminent stylist and last of the great saloon singers whose devotion to classic American songs and knack for creating new standards such as 'I Left My Heart In San Francisco' graced a decadeslong career, has died at 96.
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Tony Bennett, masterful stylist of American musical standards, dies at 96Tony Bennett, the eminent stylist and last of the great saloon singers whose devotion to classic American songs and knack for creating new standards such as 'I Left My Heart In San Francisco' graced a decadeslong career, has died at 96.
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Read more »
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