Antonia Bennett is going solo after singing with father Tony
Antonia Bennett's childhood had some unique charms. There were the parties, where the likes of Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Tormé would gather around the piano and sing. There were the times Bennett's father, Tony, took her to work, beginning when she was about 5, and gave her an early taste of the spotlight.
“My dad would just bring me up onstage, and we would sing together,” Bennett recalled in a recent interview. “I guess it started with `The Hokey Pokey' and `Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,' and then I graduated to `Puttin' on the Ritz,' and we just kept going from there, you know?”
Bennett, 49, is the younger of the crooner's two daughters by the second of his three wives, actress Sandra Grant Bennett. Over the years, she too has sung professionally, releasing a 2014 album, “Embrace Me,” and an earlier EP that mixed traditional pop standards with a cover of Pat Benatar's “Love Is a Battlefield.” For the first time since her father's death in July at 96, she is preparing to take the New York stage — and start her career anew.
“It was such a privilege to be able to get to know my dad in my adult life, and to spend so much time traveling and performing with him,” said Bennett, who regularly opened for her father and was his featured duet partner at major venues and festivals until his retirement from the stage. “And I learned so much from him.”
On Thursday, she will play two shows at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Dizzy's Club.
This month she released a new single, “Right on Time,” a breezy slice of jazz-tinged pop she co-wrote with her frequent collaborator Cliff Goldmacher, a Nashville, Tennessee, veteran who has teamed with artists including Keb' Mo' and Kesha.
The tune is one of several originals that will be included on a forthcoming album she has produced with the noted jazz pianist and arranger Christian Jacob, with vocals produced by Mark Renk.
There are also covers, of course, of standards such as “Ain't Misbehavin'” and “Exactly Like You,” set to elegant, playful jazz arrangements that flaunt her influences, which extend to pop bards including Randy Newman.
“I pull from everything,” Bennett said in a video interview from her Los Angeles home, showing off a lush mane of red hair and a girlish smile that matches her lissome, tangy singing voice, which The New York Times critic Stephen Holden once described as having “echoes of Billie Holiday and Rickie Lee Jones (with a hint of Betty Boop).” Bennett studied at Berklee College of Music and also plays piano, although “not in public,” she noted. She said the treatments on the new album are jazz “because that's where I come from.”
Bennett credits her light touch musically in part to her father's influence: “He would always give me this great advice, which is to sing the way you speak.” She added, “I think the most important thing I absorbed from my dad was how much he loved what he did — how much he got from the audience, and how much he gave in return.”