August 03, 2011. Copyright 2011, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Surviving crooner of a classic generation, Tony Bennett still mellow at 85
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, August 03, Graphic News:  Tony Bennett is unashamedly old-fashioned. He calls composers Cole Porter and George Gershwin -- whose timeless melodies date back to the first half of the 20th century -- "America's greatest ambassadors" and, by contrast, bemoans the lack of harmony, the over-emphasis on drums and the "screaming" of many modern-day pop stars. He was great friends with Sinatra, changed his stage name from Joe Bari at the suggestion of Bob Hope and cites Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby among his early influences. So it's a nice irony that New York-born Anthony Benedetto, son of an immigrant grocer from rural Italy, whose successful early career was eclipsed in the 1960s by the "British Invasion" of The Beatles and their contemporaries, should find himself, in his eighties, regarded as the height of "cool" by a younger generation of singers, from Michael Buble to the late Amy Winehouse. "She was an extraordinary musician with a rare intuition", says Bennett , who recorded the 1930s jazz standard, Body and Soul, with Winehouse at London's Abbey Road studios in March, for his forthcoming album, Duets II, to be released this autumn. "I told her she reminded me of Dinah Washington."
 
With his own share of troubles in his personal life, a period of drug addiction and a decade in the wilderness when no one would sign him and he verged on bankruptcy, Bennett's salvation came in the form of his son, Danny, one of two boys he had with his first wife, Patricia Beech. Suffering an overdose in 1979, Bennett asked his son for help. Danny became his father's manager, resurrected his career and, over the next two decades, guided him to a spectacular comeback. "He's got it turned around to a point where I've never been more exposed and out there," Bennett said in 2007. Sought out by the likes of Elvis Costello and k.d. lang on the new medium of MTV and playing intimate, "unplugged" sets, Bennett found himself respected by an audience who simply weren't around when he first recorded his great signature hits, I left my heart in San Francisco and Fly Me to the Moon, with his long-standing musical director, Ralph Sharon, at the piano. For the boy who sang while waiting on tables in Italian restaurants in Queens, was drafted at 18 and served in Europe from January 1945 -- "a front row seat in hell" he later called it -- the greatest accolades have come in the last 20 years, with all but two of his 15 Grammy awards being won between 1993 and 2007. "I think one of the reasons I'm popular again is because I'm wearing a tie," he quips. "You have to be different."
 
Bennett's best-performing chart album to date is his 2006 release, Duets, with its winning formula of Great American Songbook numbers and industry legends lining up to sing with him, among them Sting, Streisand and that "screaming" old Beatle himself, Paul McCartney. With the follow-up due out in weeks, featuring Winehouse's last recording, the odds must be on for another platinum sale. "She was all excited that I knew Dinah Washington," Bennett recalled in an interview before Winehouse's death. "From that moment on, the record came out just beautiful."
/ENDS