Obituary for Tony Bennett

In New York, at the age of 96, the famous pop singer Tony Bennett, born Anthony Dominic Benedetto, died. He was a long-liver not only in terms of years lived, but also in terms of creative activity: the beginning of his career fell on the era of the great crooners of the middle of the last century, and his last album was released in 2021.

Tony Bennett’s 61st album Love For Sale, which turned out to be his last, was already his second collaboration with Lady Gaga. The collaboration with the diva, in whose veins Italian blood also flowed, seemed to give him vitality, which, however, was already in abundance. At 85, he could still be seen at the Manhattan gym pedaling an exercise bike. And at 95, he became a Guinness record holder – the album “Love For Sale” hit the top ten of the American album chart, and no other singer at that age has been there.

Bennett released best-selling albums for seven decades and sold 50 million copies.

And for the first time a full-length Tony Bennett album hit the top 10 in 1962, and at the same time the singer earned his first two Grammys. He began performing professionally on stage in Germany, where he stayed with the American military contingent. Despite the fact that he fought for only a year, he described this period in his memoirs as follows: “I saw something that I would not wish anyone to see.” Among the operations in which the future singer participated was the release of prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp.

Antonio Benedetto’s first pseudonym was Joe Bari. After returning from Germany to the United States, he deeply immersed himself in the study of bel canto. The singer said that knowing the basics of opera singing helped him keep his voice throughout his life. In a purely artisan sense, he was superior to his colleague and friend Frank Sinatra. They were crooners – masters of heartfelt and trusting male singing on the stage. Despite the fact that Bennett was always “second” to Sinatra in the crooner shop, Sinatra himself appreciated his skill and called him “the best singer in our business.”

The first hit, which was published under the pseudonym Tony Bennett, was the song “Because Of You”. Mitch Miller, head of artists and repertoire at Columbia, with whom Bennett worked until his death, warned Bennett against imitating Sinatra, and the young artist followed his advice. The laid-back, smooth singing style that has become part of the Tony Bennett brand is fully revealed already in this composition. In 1951, “Because Of You” became a hit performed by Bennett, although it was first recorded before the war. It was played by all the jukeboxes in all the eateries. For ten weeks, Tony Bennett’s “Because Of You” remained at the top of the charts.

Like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett didn’t write songs. His talent consisted not only in vocal modulations, but also in the ability to accurately select the repertoire, including finding pearls among little-known songs that did not receive proper support on the radio.

Such was, for example, “I Left My Heart In San Francisco”, written by George Corey and Douglas Cross, young authors who moved to New York from San Francisco. The song was not known to the general public until Ralph Sheron, Bennett’s accompanist of many years, brought it to Bennett’s attention. Even Bennett did not rely on it at first and released “Once Upon A Time” on the back of the single. But radio DJs began to play “I Left My Heart In San Francisco” on the air.

In the mid-1960s, Tony Bennett’s songs, like the entire crooner song genre, were overshadowed by The Beatles and the “British Invasion”. At Columbia, the singer was encouraged to pay attention to new trends, but his experiments with the material of fashionable groups did not impress the public. Bennett terminated the contract, went to England, got a job in television and began to release new music on Verve Records. Nothing comparable to Bennett’s golden era has happened on the island. In the 1970s, he had neither management nor big touring contracts. He ran his own business and released jazz records on his own Improv label, which were of interest only to fans of the genre. I had to mortgage the house. In 1979, drug addiction almost brought him to the grave. Bennett’s business was taken over by his sons Danny and Day.

In the 1980s, they began to arrange concerts for my father in colleges and small theaters in order to gradually take him away from the “Las Vegas” image and integrate him into the new era. Bennett renewed the contract with Columbia and returned “to the family” earlier with the scandal of the departed Sharon. Album “The Art of Excellence” (1986) took only 160th place in Billboard, but critics saw in it signs of a creative renaissance of the maestro.

By the mid-1990s, Bennett’s career had come full circle. A young audience drew attention to the crooner, he began to appear on fashion talk shows and even appeared on The Simpsons, although nothing “special” was done for this.

No fancy arrangements and reworked rock hits like Paul Anka did on Rock Swings. It’s just that a whole generation has grown up for whom the sound of Sinatra and Bennett was one hundred percent “new”. Frank Sinatra’s album Duets (1993) was successfully promoted by clips aired on MTV, and in 1994 the channel decided to film a Tony Bennett concert as part of its MTV Unplugged series. In those blessed times, seeing Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Bruce Springsteen, Tony Bennett and Bob Dylan in the same row was par for the course. Album recorded during “MTV Unplugged” got a Grammy. In 1998, Tony Bennett performed at the Glastonbury Festival. By the end of the 1990s, his fortune was estimated at $20 million.

By the turn of the new century, he had pulled himself out of trouble and reclaimed front-row crooner status. He lived in his apartment overlooking Central Park and wrote his memoirs. And in 2014 he suddenly released a joint album with Lady Gaga. That by the fourth LP in her biography has already come to songs from the “great American songbook”, usually this means the need to restart her career. And for Tony Bennett, it was his native language. They went on a joint tour, earned $ 15 million, and then, despite the development of Alzheimer’s disease in Bennett, they recorded another album, consisting entirely of songs by Col Porter.

Tony Bennett said: “My secret is that I never sing badly written songs.” The light shining through his music was a kind of defensive reaction. Having been “in the front row of hell,” as he called his military experience, he was a consistent opponent of forceful solutions to any conflicts and protested against all military operations that America initiated in the past and present centuries. He sang as if there was no war at all.

As reported in his social networks, a few days before his death, he was sitting at the piano and singing “Because Of You”.

Igor Gavrilov