Bennett not just surviving at 90, he’s thriving

Singer gets standing ovations at Riverside

Tony Bennett has lost some of his lung power and range, but he isn’t like a graying athlete honored for ancient achievements and humored because he can still hobble across a field during charity events.

At the Riverside Theater Sunday evening, the 90-year-old singer was more like a baseball pitcher who, acknowledging that he can’t throw the smoke he could in his rookie year, has developed a knuckleball, a sidearm change-up and a special-grip pitch.

Bennett showed other signs of his age: He lacked the broad-shouldered physical presence of his youth, and the piano was a place for him to lean about a third as often as it was aplace for pianist Billy Stritch to sit.

Stritch, along with guitarist Gray Sargent, bassist Marshall Wood and drummer Harold Jones — the Tony Bennett Quartet — got plenty of chances to display chops while the star attraction waved a benedictory hand in each instrumentalist’s direction.

On occasion, Bennett was a halfstep behind the song, such as on his rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Steppin’ Out with My Baby.” Or he was too strident in his mood-change volume adjustments, such as on a softly arranged take of Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke’s “But Beautiful.”

Yet Bennett’s commanding familiarity with those songs, as well as with so many other classic pop and vocaljazz numbers, often allowed him to give a phrase an ingenious swing or lead the tune toward a spot where he could, so to speak, dance with it.

He and Sargent, working as a duo until a brassily bursting bridge from the rest of the quartet, unlocked particularly intimate romanticism within Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields’ “The Way You Look Tonight.”

Bennett was also able to wring some freshness from “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” a signature song the man’s done so often since 1962 that his continued enthusiasm for it is a wonder.

It was more of a wonder how Bennett could suddenly locate both his smoke and his flame to light up the end of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Love Is Here to Stay” and the entirety of an a cappella “Fly Me to the Moon.”

The audience, which filled about three-quarters of the venue, soaked up his set, which lasted from about 7:50 p.m. to about 9:10 p.m. Monkish students applauded him with the volume of sailors on shore leave. Those standing ovations weren’t out of sympathy.

As long as he’s singing, Tony Bennett is doing more than surviving.