SantaFeToday.com Santa Fe’s Hometown News
By Arnie Leshin
Tony Bennett’s voice wrapped all his vocal selves together.
He was a hitting, glancing jazz singer, a low-key searching supper-club performer, a belter who reached rocking fortissimos, he drove a ballad as intensely as Sinatra, he was an elusive singer.
It all came to a long-time end when he passed away Friday night at his home for many, many decades in the New York City borough of Manhattan. He was 96.
No matter, he was still entertaining and his last public performance was in August of 2021 when he appeared with Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall in a show titled One Last Time, a truly appropriate one.
He learned he had Alzheimer’s disease in 2016, his then wife, Susan Benedetto, reported in the AARP The Magazine in February of 2021. But he continued to perform and record despite his illness.
I had become used to seeing him walking out on stage, especially when he did so in his later years to a huge ovation upon joining in with the Billy Joel television show. Heck, he must have been doing this after already turning something like in the 80s.
I remember Joel’s show at then-Shea Stadium when out came smiling Bennett, a microphone in hand, and already into the popular tune “New York, New York”.
Also a native of Long Island, the likeable, talented Joel, great at his concerts and especially before huge, sold-out appreciative crowds at Madison Square Garden, said he enjoyed having Bennett join in with him.
As for Bennett, he appeared wherever he asked to. In 2008, he even answered a call to appear at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem with the Count Basie Orchestra.
Now Bennett’s most popular recording of all was “I left my heart in San Francisco”, was deceiving for he was born and raised in the Long Island City area of the borough of Queens.
From in the early 1950s when he wowed audiences at the Paramount Theater in Times Square through his late-in-life duets with younger singers gleaned from a range of genres and generations, he was an active promoter of both songwriting and entertaining as timeless, noble pursuits.
He stubbornly resisted record producers who urged gimmick songs against him, or in the 1960s and early 70s, who were sure that rock ‘n’ roll had relegated the music he preferred to a dusty bin perused only by a dwindling population of the elderly and nostalgic.
Instead, he followed in the musical path of the greatest American pop singers of the 20th century, the likes of whom were Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Sinatra, and carried the torch for them into the 21st.
It could be said he reached the height of stardom in 1962 with a celebrated concert at New York’s legendary Carnegie Hall, and from where came 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 exuberated by a failing marriage and drug problems, in the end, more than vindicated in his musical judgement.
In an autobiography written with Will Friedwald in the Good Life in 1998, Bennett wrote, “I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered to people.”
Funny how he was still singing “San Francisco”, and that led many people to think he was a native of that city, although he was really a New Yorker through and through and for centuries showed it. When he was on stage, he followed up “San Francisco” with all his New York numbers and the crowds loved it.
He often bragged about the New York teams like the Yankees, the Mets, the Giants, the Jets, the Rangers, the Knicks.
He sang on the Ed Sullivan show, the David Letterman show, he sang Rosemary Clooney when she was in her 20s, and Celine Dion when she was in her 2Os.
He won his first two Grammy Awards in 1963 for “San Francisco”, and his last for Love for Sale, and together there were 20 of them, including in 2001 a lifetime achievement award, and by some estimates, sold more than 60 million records.
A singer whose melodic clarity, jazz-influenced phrasing, audience-embracing persona and warm, deceptively simple interpretations of musical standards helped spread the American songbook around the world and won him generations of fans.
Yes, quite a long journey for the man who just loved to entertain. He left his heart on the stage from the east coast to the west coast.
