Tony Bennett dies as a self-made star
Nice guys finish last, or so it is sometimes said. To which Tony Bennett might have replied: Not if the nice guy keeps racing the longest. One of a raft of good-looking Italian American crooners of the postwar era, Bennett was still singing and still swinging long after the others were gone. He became something he had never been in his prime: a living legend. Even when Alzheimer’s had taken most of his memories, the singer never lost the tune.
Dead at 96, the man born Anthony Benedetto had a career that stretched from “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” (a TV show so ancient its early scripts were in cuneiform) to Lady Gaga, his partner on his final tour. For much of that run of seven decades, he was overshadowed. Someone hearing his first hits in 1951 might have marked him as a wannabe Perry Como, a relaxed singer with a thin but pleasant voice. Later, when he recorded and performed with Count Basie’s orchestra with a cigarette between his fingers and an identical tuxedo for every day of the week, one couldn’t help looking past him to Frank Sinatra. Bennett’s efforts at movies and television paled beside the stardom of Dean Martin.
They were all sons of working-class immigrants who left Italy around the turn of the 20th century and carried with them the culture of bel canto — “beautiful singing” is the literal translation — in which the great heritage of Italian opera infused popular songs with flowing legato. The same tradition spawned Russ Columbo, Frankie Laine, Al Martino and Vic Damone. Their younger brothers sought to carry the tradition into rock’n’roll: Frankie Avalon, Frankie Valli, Bobby Darin and Bobby Rydell, to name a few. But the winds changed, and by the late 1960s the cutting edges of popular music were found in the electrified tool kit of American blues.
Another culture also made the trip from Italy to America, one immortalized by filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. “Cosa Nostra” — it translates to “Our Thing” — flourished in the new homeland alongside the sweet-singing dreamboats of Bennett’s early years. As that era faded, the two cultures meshed in Coppola’s 1972 masterpiece “The Godfather.” In the opening scenes, set just after World War II, the head of the fictional Corleone crime family throws a lavish wedding for his daughter. A handsome young star, played by Martino but meant to conjure Sinatra, puts in a command performance on the godfather’s lawn and later seeks his help landing a part in a big Hollywood movie.
This nod and wink at the mob ties that both haunted and glamorized Ol’ Blue Eyes burnished Sinatra’s bad-boy quality; along with his nearly unmatched interpretive artistry and his outlaw vibe kept him relevant in the rock-and-roll years.
Bennett was the opposite of a bad boy, well-liked by his fellow musicians, a warm father whose sons wanted to work with him, a performer who put his fame on the line in 1965 to march with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for voting rights. His one attempt at rockage relevance, an album full of awkward covers, made him want to throw up, he later said. In his years of eclipse, Bennett acquired and conquered an addiction to drugs and alcohol, but not the live-fast, die-young kind of addiction that rock culture encouraged. His was the aging, irrelevant-star kind, as he became, at best, a trivia question: Whatever happened to that guy who sang so sweetly about leaving his heart in San Francisco?
But here’s the thing — Tony Bennett kept going, leaning into the one quality in which he absolutely excelled, top of his class, best of his generation: taste. No one had better taste while paging through the Great American Songbook, and Sinatra himself ranked Bennett the most impeccable authority on a songwriter’s intent. “For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,” said the Chairman of the Board to Life magazine. “He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”
After a country singer, Willie Nelson, stunned the music world in 1978 with an acoustic album of classic standards that captured the fancy of the disco and heavy-metal era (“Stardust”), Bennett pulled himself together to meet the new converts to the old songs. The first fruit of his second season was “The Art of Excellence,” released in 1986 — one exquisite, mostly neglected, song after another — revealed, not just sung, by an artist whose timbre had become almost irrelevant to his craft. Backed by an understated trio, Bennett was working magic.
He continued to do so for the next 30-plus years, finally emerging from every shadow, even Sinatra’s. Tony Bennett sang selflessly in the service of wonderful songs, and beautiful singing it was.