Tony Bennett Dead at 96

By Donald Liebenson

Tony Bennett, the peerless interpreter of the Great American Songbook, and whom Frank Sinatra called “the best in the business,” died Friday in New York City. He was 96.

To quote the title of his career-revitalizing 1986 album, Bennett devoted his nearly 70-year career to The Art of Excellence. One unfortunate album aside (1970’s Tony Bennett Sings the Great Hits of Today), Bennett refused to compromise his music by pandering to trends of the moment to appeal to younger audiences. “Just because disco is popular or rap, I was taught to just be myself and not to imitate what others are doing,” he told me in a 2011 interview to mark his 85th birthday. “Never do an inferior song. I look for definitive versions of songs like [those sung by] Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole. They came from an era of nothing but the best quality and creative musicianship.”

Thus, the setlist for Bennett’s Grammy-nominated 1998 children’s album, The Playground, included such kid-friendly standards as “Swinging on a Star,” “AC-Cen-T-ChuAte the Positive” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon.”

In 2006 and 2011, Bennett recorded the Grammy-winning collections, Duets: An American Classic and Duets II, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, making Bennett, at 85, the oldest artist to achieve this milestone. His collaborators included Bono, Aretha Franklin, Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, Sting, Barbra Streisand, Carrie Underwood and Amy Winehouse. This did not make Bennett trendy; it made him timeless. He topped himself in 2014 when, at the age of 88, his collaboration with Lady Gaga, Cheek to Cheek, likewise debuted at No. 1.

Bennett recorded more than 70 albums, not including compilations. He is one of a few recording artists to have albums that have charted in each of seven decades. He was honored with 18 Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award, and was nominated for 36. His 13 Grammys for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album are the most in the category’s history. His most recent win was in 2015 for The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern, which earned Best Traditional Pop Vocals honors.

He performed for 11 American presidents and won two Emmy Awards for his television specials, Tony Bennett Live by Request (1996) and Tony Bennett: An American Classic (2006). He was a 2005 Kennedy Center Honors recipient and the 2006 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Jazz Master honoree. He was the recipient of Billboard magazine 2016 Century Award, the magazine’s highest honor, and the 2017 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize, which is bestowed on recipients “whose career reflects lifetime achievement in promoting song as a vehicle of musical expression and cultural understanding.”

“I don’t think there’s anyone ever at Mr. Bennett’s age that is still touring, and singing and sounding so amazing,” Gloria Estefan told reporters in 2017, when Bennett was 90, prior to tribute concert in honor of his Gershwin Prize. “He gets up every day, happy to create and to do something new. He’s really someone to look up to.”

Bennett himself told the New York Times that year, “I still insist that I can get better as I go along.”

Tony Bennett was born Anthony Dominick Benedetto on Aug. 3, 1926 in Astoria, Queens. His grocer father died when he was 10. Tony quit school at 16 to help support his family, and among his jobs was singing waiter and band singer.

By Bess Levin

By Charlotte Klein

By Eric Lutz

He served overseas in the Army during World War II and returned home in 1946. Under the G.I. Bill of Rights, he studied the highly-disciplined bel canto style of singing that is traditionally associated with opera singers, which he credited with helping to keep his singing voice in shape into his 90s.

Bennett performed in clubs under the stage name Joe Bari. An engagement at the Shangri-La, an upscale Astoria club, and radio appearances followed. In 1949, Pearl Bailey gave him his big break when she invited him to join her musical revue at the Village Inn, a Greenwich Village club. There, Bob Hope, who was then appearing at the Paramount Theatre, saw Bennett and invited him to join his show. It was Hope who coined the stage name Tony Bennett.

In 1950, Bennett signed with Columbia Records and in 1951, he scored his first No. 1 hit, “Because of You.” Other hits followed, including “Stranger in Paradise,” “Smile” and “Rags to Riches,” which had prominent placement in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Albums such as The Beat of My Heart and Basie Swings, Bennett Sings anticipated his forays into jazz singing.

In 1962, Bennett recorded, “Once Upon a Time,” which he believed would be a hit single. But it was the flip-side, I Left My Heart in San Francisco, that clicked. It won Bennett his first Grammy and became his signature song. When asked why this of all of his songs so resonated with people, he cited its’ climactic lyric: “When I come home to you, San Francisco/Your golden sun will shine for me.” “That represents the fulfillment of a dream,” he told me. “We’d all like someday to be successful. ‘When I come home to you’ means that the dream came true.”

Bennett had other hits in the early 1960s, including “The Shadow of Your Smile,” “I Wanna Be Around” and “The Good Life” (whose title he took for his 1994 memoir), as well as critically-acclaimed albums. He powerfully lent his voice and presence to the Civil Rights Movement, marching alongside Martin Luther King during the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery.

But the British Invasion, led by the Beatles in 1964, and the rock and roll era signaled a turning of the pop culture tide. He and Columbia parted ways in 1971 after the label wanted a follow-up to Tony Bennett Sings the Hits of Today, an album Bennett despised.

Professionally and personally, the 1970s was a fallow decade for Bennett. His first marriage ended in divorce. Bennett co-founded his own record label, Improv Records and although the recordings were critically acclaimed, they did not sell and the label was short-lived, putting Bennett deeply in debt to the IRS. He struggled with drug addiction until a friend, who had previously managed comedian Lenny Bruce, said that Bennett had “sinned against his talent.” Bennett told Chris Cuomo in a 2011 interview on ABC-TV newsmagazine 20/20, “That one sentence just changed my life. It meant that I had to drop everything I was doing. I stopped all drugs completely.”

By Bess Levin

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By Eric Lutz

Danny Bennett, a son from Bennett’s first marriage, became his personal manager and engineered his father’s comeback and his return to Columbia. 1986’s The Art of Excellence was Bennett’s first album to reach the pop charts in 14 years. It began a spectacular string of critically-acclaimed and best-selling recordings that celebrated musical heroes (among them Bennett/Berlin, Perfectly Frank and Steppin’ Out, featuring songs popularized by dancer Fred Astaire, Bennett Sings Ellington: Hot and Cool and Here’s to the Ladies) .

In 2014, Cheek to Cheek, a collection of standards that paired Bennett and Lady Gaga, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 200 pop and rock chart. The subsequent PBS special was nominated for an Emmy. In his ninth decade, Bennett sold a reported 10 million albums.

Bennett, to paraphrase the title of his idol Frank Sinatra’s own signature song, did it his way. When he appeared on MTV Unplugged, guest artists such as k.d. lang and Elvis Costello dueted on songs from Bennett’s vast repertoire of standards, and not the other way around. He played intimate clubs and the finest concert halls rather than impersonal stadiums.

It was a testament to his cross-generational appeal that he appeared on American Idol, voiced himself on The Simpsons, made a self-deprecating cameo opposite a Bennett-impersonating Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live and guested on The Howard Stern Show and Late Night with David Letterman.

Danny Bennett booked him with alternative acts like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Lemonheads. “He told me that he deplores the notion of demographics,” Danny told The Chicago Tribune in 1994. “So I knew it was a matter of turning the market around. Instead of fitting the artist to the marketing, I fit the marketing to the artist.”

Bennett was a champion of the arts. He co-founded Exploring the Arts (ETA) with his third wife, Susan Crow, a Tony Bennett fan club member who met Bennett backstage when she was 19. ETA supports public school arts education. One of ETA’s first initiatives was the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a public school which opened in New York City in 2009.

Bennett was also a recognized painter, whose works are in the Smithsonian collections as well as the Butler Institute in Youngstown, OH. The 2007 book, Tony Bennett in the Studio: A Life of Art and Music, features 200 of his works. He took up sculpting at the age of 85.

In addition to his memoir, Bennett also wrote two collections of anecdotes and life lessons, Life is a Gift in 2012 and Just Getting Started in 2016. But he was an Oscar short of an EGOT. His acting career began and ended with The Oscar, a 1966 critical and box office flop now considered something of a camp classic, and which handed Bennett such cringeworthy dialogue as, “Like a junkie shooting pure quicksilver into his veins, Frankie got turned on by the wildest narcotic known to man: success!”

Bennett continued to record as well as tour after he was diagnosed in 2016 with Alzheimer’s. Antonia Bennett, his daughter from his second marriage (that union dissolved in 2007), opened his shows. A second collection of duets he recorded with Lady Gaga between 2018-2020 was scheduled for release in the spring of this year. Bennett’s family revealed the singer’s condition in a February 2021 AARP profile.

Latter-year profiles of Bennett that were written without knowledge of his Alzheimer’s diagnosis make for poignant reading. “Tony’s all about moving forward,” Danny Bennett said in the 2017 New York Times article. “He tells me, ‘Hey, as long as my voice doesn’t wobble and people like me, I’m going to keep singing until I die.’”

Bennett himself is quoted in the piece too: “I could have retired 16 years ago, but I just love what I’m doing.”

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