The appeal of Tony Bennett was “elusive,” according to music critics who never quite figured the guy out. Whitney Balliett, the longtime jazz critic for The New Yorker, wrote, “He can be a belter who reaches rocking fortissimo. He drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key, searching supper-club performer.” But, he added, “Bennett’s voice binds all his vocal selves together.”
Most simply, the composer and critic Alec Wilder said about Mr. Bennett’s voice, “There is a quality about it that lets you in.”
Tony Bennett died yesterday in New York City at age 96 — the last of American troubadours who spread the classic American songbook to every corner of the earth, making George Gershwin and other brilliant American composers household names on four continents.
No, Bennett didn’t have the breathless phrasing of Sinatra, Bing Crosby’s timbre, Ella Fitzgerald’s energy, or Louis Armstrong’s playfulness. But 60 million records, untold number of concerts, and a career that spanned seven decades say something unprecedented and incredible about Tony Bennett — and the nation that birthed him, nurtured him, and gave him such unabashed love.
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“For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,” Frank Sinatra told Life magazine in 1965. “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.”
Yes, yes, and yes. There was an approachable quality to Bennett’s voice and on-stage presence that put audiences at ease with the first note. But it was how he sang the old standards — the passion, the obvious affection for the music — that endeared him to his fans.
“I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered to people,” he said in “The Good Life” (1998), an autobiography written with Will Friedwald.
Mr. Bennett’s career of more than 70 years was remarkable not only for its longevity, but also for its consistency. In hundreds of concerts and club dates and more than 150 recordings, he devoted himself to preserving the classic American popular song, as written by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others.
Instead, he followed in the musical path of the greatest American pop singers of the 20th century — Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra — and carried the torch for them into the 21st. He reached the height of stardom in 1962 with a celebrated concert at Carnegie Hall and the release of his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” And though he saw his popularity wane with the onset of rock and his career went through a trough in the 1970s, when professional difficulties were exacerbated by a failing marriage and drug problems, he was, in the end, more than vindicated in his musical judgment.
Perhaps more than most “crooners” from the ’40s and ’50s, Bennett didn’t mind sharing the limelight with other singers. His duets with such stars as Judy Garland, Amy Whitehouse, k.d. lang, and Lady Gaga demonstrated a largeness of spirit as well as a keen commercial sense that some other stars may have lacked.
Those qualities and more came together in this classic power duet with Celine Dion, “If I Ruled the World.”
He had a storyteller’s grace with a lyric, a jazzman’s sureness with a melody, and in his finest performances he delivered them with a party giver’s welcome, a palpable and infectious affability. In his presentation, the songs he loved and sang — “Just in Time,” “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “Rags to Riches” and “I Wanna Be Around,” to name a handful of his emblematic hits — became engaging, life-embracing parables.
Another iconic Bennett performance was before game 1 of the 1998 World Series between his beloved New York Yankees and the San Diego Padres. “America the Beautiful” was never sung with such passion.
Somewhere in heaven, there’s a corner reserved for Tony Bennett and all his American friends and fellow troubadours. They sang songs that filled the empty spaces in people’s lives with powerful emotions and beautiful memories — memories that will last long after their mortal remains turn to dust.
