RIP Tony Bennett

[ladypanther]

 

 

 

 

Edited July 21, 2023 by ladypanther

[OceanPanther]

He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2016. He and my mother are/ were the same age.  My mother too has Alzheimer's .  Tony's last performance was in 2021 with Lady Gaga..  Alzheimer's patients seem to never lose their memory for music/ lyrics.  A blessing for him as well as my mother.   He might not be able to tell you what he had for breakfast, but I'm sure the lyrics flowed for him, as they do my mother.

What a great American talent

[ladypanther]

Few entertainers in any field have had such a remarkable and enduring second act as singer Tony Bennett. He had his first top-selling hit in 1951 with “Because of You,” then topped the charts again more than 60 years later, collaborating with pop star Lady Gaga to become the oldest person ever to have a No. 1 album.

He was a singer of the pre-rock school, a tuxedo-clad throwback whose career faltered in the 1960s and ’70s, when he refused to sing music he thought was beneath his talents. Then, with his son managing a late-career revival, Mr. Bennett began to connect with younger audiences of the MTV generation, soaring into a second-time-around stardom in the 1990s without changing his classic style or even loosening his tie.

His albums were on the charts in every decade from the 1950s to the 2020s. He was a star before Elvis Presley recorded his first song and was still at the top of his game in the era of Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Jay-Z, giving him what critic Gary Giddins called “the longest last laugh in history.”

Mr. Bennett, who won 20 Grammy Awards and performed for every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Obama

“Tony Bennett possesses one of the great voices and singing careers of the last 60 years,” John Edward Hasse, a music historian who was a longtime curator of American music at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, said before Mr. Bennett’s death. “Not very many singers, much less musicians, have achieved that kind of durability. He’s got a jazz musician’s phrasing and sense of timing, as well as a feeling for spontaneity. These are classic, timeless aesthetic values that he personifies.”

Beginning as a bobby-sox idol in the mold of Frank Sinatra, Mr. Bennett became a star in the early 1950s with such hit songs as “Because of You,” “Rags to Riches,” “Stranger in Paradise” and a pop version of country singer Hank Williams’s “Cold, Cold Heart.”

........... his musical catalogue was balanced between saccharine pop tunes and more challenging material, which he often performed with leading jazz musicians. He perfected a style that changed little throughout the years. He sang ballads with a warm intimacy, bounced through fast-tempo tunes with swinging gusto and often finished songs with a full-throated, operatic ending.

In 1961, just as rock-and-roll was about to eclipse the traditional pop favored by Mr. Bennett, his pianist, Ralph Sharon, suggested that he try out a new tune for a tour to the West Coast. Mr. Bennett recorded “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” by the little-known songwriting team of Douglass Cross and George Cory, in a single take in 1962, and it was released as the B-side of the single “Once Upon a Time.” Even though it did not reach No. 1, “San Francisco” became one of the best-selling records of 1962 and stayed on the charts for almost three years. It earned Mr. Bennett his first Grammy Awards, for record of the year and best male solo vocal performance.

Asked if he ever got tired of the song, Mr. Bennett replied: “Do you ever get tired of making love?”

“For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,” Sinatra told Life magazine in 1965, at the height of Mr. Bennett’s initial fame. “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.”

 

....he had another experience in the Army that shaped his life. In Germany, Mr. Bennett ran into a Black friend from New York and joined him for Thanksgiving dinner. Mr. Bennett’s commanding officer reprimanded him for associating with African Americans and transferred him to a different unit.

For the rest of his life, Mr. Bennett was a quiet political activist and advocate for civil rights. He campaigned for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and joined Martin Luther King Jr. on the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.

 

Mr. Bennett continued to perform for five years after he received his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2016, his wife revealed to the AARP website in 2021. Despite his condition, he never forgot a lyric while singing. In August 2021, he gave two farewell concerts at New York’s Radio City Music Hall with Lady Gaga to commemorate his 95th birthday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/07/21/singing-star-tony-bennett-dies/

For more than seven decades, Mr. Bennett was known for his ageless, agile voice, for the intimacy of his interpretations and for an impeccable sense of style and musical taste that had a lasting appeal.

Edited July 21, 2023 by ladypanther