Tony Bennett titled his 1998 autobiography “The Good Life,” which was also the title of a song by French composer Sacha Distel that the singer first recorded in 1963 and became a staple of his repertoire. And Bennett, who died on Friday at the age of 96, indeed led the good life as a singer, painter, and humanitarian.
The song was featured on his live 1994 album “MTV Unplugged,” which introduced him to a new generation of fans and won two Grammys, including Album of the Year.
RELATED STORY: Tony Bennett, masterful stylist of American musical standards, dies at 96
Bennett had a deceptively simple formula that enabled him to enjoy a recording career that spanned nine decades: Don’t compromise, sing quality songs, and always respect your audience and leave them feeling good after a concert. Bennett’s first recording was in 1946 for Armed Forces Radio of the blues’ “St. James Infirmary.” He went out on top with his final studio recording, the Grammy-winning 2021 release ”Love for Sale,” a duet album with Lady Gaga featuring songs by Cole Porter.
Over the years, I had the privilege to interview Bennett about a half dozen times when I was working as an editor for a mainstream news outlet. After his death, I needed a couple of days to look through my files and interview transcripts.
Bennett treated interviewers the same way he did his audiences: With respect, humility, and graciousness. I’d like to share some of my memories and impressions as a tribute to this music legend.
Bennett preferred to do press interviews in his artist’s studio on Central Park South with a sweeping view of the park. He led a double life sharing his passions for singing and painting. He studied both music and art at the New York High School of Industrial Arts before dropping out to help support his family by working as a singing waiter.
The other blessing
In an interview, Bennett told me that it was Duke Ellington who offered him “the advice to do two things instead of one … which worked out to be a blessing in my life.” He said that whenever he got stressed out from singing, he would get “a big lift” by turning to his painting.
He liked to paint landscapes, and often could be found sitting on a bench in Central Park with his sketch pad. He also did portraits of performers who had influenced him: Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Ellington. (That portrait is on display in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.)
Bennett would paint while he was on the road touring. He’d sign his works with his family name: Benedetto. His artwork graced the Christmas cards that he and his wife, Susan, sent out every year.
I first interviewed Bennett in early 2006 after he had been nominated for a Grammy for the album “The Art of Romance,” a collection of humorous, sad, and optimistic songs describing all stages of romance. That album marked the first time ever that Bennett’s name could be found among the songwriting credits. He wrote lyrics to a song he titled “All For You,” which was adapted from a dreamy tune “Nuages.” (“Clouds’” by the legendary Belgian Roma jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.)
His son and manager Danny, who helped turn his career around for the MTV generation, encouraged the reluctant Bennett to write the song lyrics.
“I always stayed away from that, I told him, because I can’t compete with Cole Porter or Duke Ellington or Jerome Kern or Irving Berlin,” Bennett said in an interview. “I’ve always been an interpreter of the Great American Songbook through my life. And he said, `Well give it a shot. So I took a crack at it, and it’s the first time I’ve ever written a song myself.”
In that interview, Bennett previewed what would be his next major project, “Duets: An American Classic,” released in conjunction with celebrations of his 80th birthday. It featured performances with singers from across the musical spectrum including Elton John, Paul McCartney, John Legend, Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, Bono, and The Dixie Chicks.
the importance of being in person
I interviewed Bennett again when the album came out later that year. There was one thing that stood out: Bennett insisted on recording the tracks in the studio with each duet partner rather than rely on long-distance, multitrack technology as Frank Sinatra did on his 1993 electronically assembled “Duets” album.
And these stars all showed the respect they held for Bennett by answering the call to perform their songs in person with him. Many of the tracks were recorded at the now-closed Bennett Studios in Englewood, New Jersey, run by the singer’s other son, Dae, a recording engineer. “I’ve always worked that way … for the spontaneity and freshness of an honest performance,” Bennett said.
The songs on “Duets” had all been previously recorded by Bennett and represented a career retrospective, so I asked him to pick some of the songs and reflect on what they meant to him. Here are three of the songs he chose:
- “Rags to Riches.” Bennett said the song’s title reminded him of his rise from humble origins growing up in the working-class neighborhood of Astoria, Queens, across the river from Manhattan. His father, an Italian immigrant grocer, inspired his love of singing, but died when Bennett was 10 years old.
His mother raised Bennett and his two siblings by working as a seamstress during the Depression. Bennett said his mother imbued in him a sense of the importance of quality in your work. She would occasionally toss aside what she considered to be a bad dress, insisting she only wanted to work on good dresses. Bennett never forgot what it meant to grow up poor, and he made a comment that’s quite relevant today:
“The whole country is obsessed with being told that they have to fear this and that. If I can entertain people and make them forget their problems, it’s very gratifying to me. I have enough. I don’t understand how some people can have billions of dollars. If you have $1 billion you could buy anything. … I don’t understand someone having $39 billion. Give it out to the poor.”
- “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.” Bennett said two then-unknown songwriters, George Cory and Douglass Cross, had given some sheet music to his pianist and musical director Ralph Sharon, who then stuffed it into his shirt drawer. Bennett was performing in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1961 when Sharon took a look at the song’s title and thought it might be good material for an upcoming date at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.
“I Left My Heart in San Francisco” was released as the B-side on a single, but it would earn Bennett his first two Grammys, including Record of the Year, and become his theme song. But Bennett said the song impacted him in another way:
“The greatest thing that ever happened to me as an entertainer was hearing how the soldiers waiting to come home from Vietnam were sitting around the fire and singing ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ because when they came home they’d first have to come through San Francisco. Even today because of the Iraqi war, every time I sing … ‘When I come home to you San Francisco,’ I think of the boys coming home.”
- “How Do You Keep the Music Playing.” This song was composed by Michel Legrand with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman for the 1982 film “Best Friends.” Bennett says Sinatra was singing this ballad at a concert in the Universal Amphitheater when he pointed to his friend and said, “Tony, sing this song for everybody.” Bennett took Sinatra’s advice and the song became the closing number for most of his concerts. That led Bennett to talk about Sinatra’s role as a mentor.
“Sinatra was my master. When I first met him, I was very nervous and went to see him backstage at the Paramount Theatre … I said how do I eliminate being frightened on the stage and he said the public will help you, don’t worry about that. … He also taught me don’t ever do cheap songs, just do great songs. … Sinatra was the one who said I was his favorite singer and really changed my career. … He helped me an awful lot throughout my life.”
outside the box
Bennett also enlisted Rob Marshall, director of the Oscar-winning film musical “Chicago,” to create an outside-the-box musical variety show based on the “Duets” album for a 2006 Thanksgiving TV special, “Tony Bennett: An American Classic,” that would win multiple Emmys. The stage of the art deco Los Angeles Theater was transformed into venues that figured prominently in the singer’s career, including an after-hours New York jazz club, the Columbia Records studio, the Sahara Casino in Las Vegas, and Carnegie Hall.
Marshall told me in an interview for a story about the TV special that he had difficulty holding his emotions in check while filming the opening number with Bennett in an empty theater singing Charlie Chaplin’s tender ballad “Smile,” and Barbra Streisand making a dramatic entrance. Marshall said it marked the first time these two American pop music icons had ever performed together on stage.
“Tony’s singing so beautifully, and then Barbra appears. That was a goosebump moment for me when I pinched myself … two legendary singers singing one of the most beautiful songs ever written, very simply on a bare stage,” Marshall said. “I thought it was quite poetic that we were … in the same movie palace where Chaplin premiered all his films.”
.
I next interviewed Bennett in 2009 when he and his wife, Susan, a former public schoolteacher, opened the new state-of-the-art permanent home of the Fame-style public arts high school that he had founded in 2001. Fittingly, the school was located in his old neighborhood of Astoria. The public-private initiative came at a time when school districts across the country were cutting arts programs.
a name with integrity
Wealthy arts patrons like billionaire David H. Koch often put their name on any major project that they fund, but Bennett insisted that the school be named the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts after his close friend. There is a Tony Bennett Concert Hall inside the school.
“It’s beyond any dream I could have ever had,” Bennett said in an interview. “By calling it the Sinatra School it’s a symbol of hoping that the students will always do something with integrity, not just for fame and a quick buck which is quite prevalent today.”
A sophomore vocal student, John-Alexander Sakelos, said that Bennett would frequently come to the school. “He’s not the typical international star. … he’s still the same down-to-earth Astoria type of person.”
Susan Benedetto said the school was “sort of our child. What I admire most about Tony is that somebody of his talent and stature would take the time to get behind the public school children and start a school. … I think it’s really a magnificent part of what will be his legacy.”
I would do two more interviews with Bennett, both of which were about albums where he displayed his jazz artistry. In 2013, Columbia released “Bennett/Brubeck: The White House Sessions, Live 1962.” A routine search of the Sony Music Entertainment archives yielded a one-hour tape that had been mislabeled as “American Jazz Concert” with no reference to the musicians on it.
It turned out to be a tape of a 1962 concert featuring pianist Dave Brubeck and Bennett each performing with their bands. The concert was held at an open-air theater at the base of the Washington Monument, an event organized by President John F. Kennedy’s White House for college-age summer interns.
Bennett did four unrehearsed encore numbers with Brubeck’s trio with drummer Joe Morello and bassist Eugene Wright, the first time these two legendary musicians had ever performed together.
It was a rare chance to hear Brubeck perform Great American Songbook standards like “That Old Black Magic” and “Lullaby of Broadway” with a top-flight jazz singer. Bennett said the performance inspired him to work with other jazz pianists, including Bill Evans, whom he met at the D.C. concert. He later would record two duet albums with Evans in the 1970s that rank among his best recordings.
“It was very spontaneous—a real jam session, where you really don’t plan what you’re going to sing or how you’re going to play it. I just gave Dave the key and the song, and we just went for it. The audience went crazy, and you can hear the reaction on the record.”
Brubeck and Bennett would only perform together one more time: at the 2009 Newport Jazz Festival, when Brubeck sat in with Bennett to reprise “That Old Black Magic.”
a devotion to the great american songbook
The last time I interviewed Bennett was in January 2016 when his album with jazz pianist Bill Charlap, “The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern,” was nominated (and later won) a Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album, a category Bennett had dominated since it was established in 1992.
Unlike his high-profile, chart-topping duets albums with Lady Gaga, this was a sublime, intimate collaboration with a jazz pianist devoted like Bennett to the Great American Songbook. Charlap had a pedigree in that tradition as the son of Broadway composer Moose Charlap (“Peter Pan”) and pop singer Sandy Stewart. Kern was best known for the 1927 musical “Showboat,” which had a story-driven theme about racial prejudice that transformed American musical theater. He blazed a trail that George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and other composers followed.
Bennett thought “Silver Lining” should have been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Jazz Vocal album category.
“I think it should be a jazz album because of Bill Charlap, who’s a great jazz piano player,” Bennett said in the interview. “That’s the reason I made the album. I just can’t believe how much he understands the piano, knowing when to stop, when to go on a long run and when to keep it very simple.”
Charlap said he noticed in concerts that Bennett would never sing a song the same way. ”He may sing different notes, different phrasing … He’s an extemporaneous singer, truly a jazz singer in that sense.”
“I think as Duke Ellington said, he’s beyond category. He’s a pop singer and a jazz singer. He’s a bel canto singer and an expressive theatrical singer. He’s all of these things. He’s Tony Bennett. He’s an original.”
Bennett said he “grew up being a jazz singer.” But in the early 1950s, after signing a contract with Columbia Records that had just lost Sinatra, Mitch Miller, the head of the label’s pop singles division, discouraged him from singing in a jazz style. But Bennett broke free in 1955 when he recorded an LP, “Cloud 7,” with a small jazz combo led by guitarist Chuck Wayne. Afterward, his bands regularly included jazz musicians.
Bennett said he really didn’t know how to categorize himself.
“All I try to do when I perform is attempt to make people happy. … From the minute that I’m on stage to the very end, all I’m trying to do is make people feel good about listening and watching the show.”
Tony, thanks for the memories and a life well lived.