Bennett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016. His last album, the 2021 release ‘Love for Sale’, featured duets with Lady Gaga on the title track, ‘Night and Day’ and songs by the Northern songwriter American Cole Porter.
Tony Bennett, the eminent and timeless singer whose decades-long career earned him admirers from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga, died Friday. He was 96, just two weeks short of his birthday.
His devotion to classic American songs earned him his first Grammy Award for the 1962 hit ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’.
Publicist Sylvia Weiner confirmed Bennett’s death, saying he died in his hometown of New York.
As one of the last great saloon singers of the mid-20th century, Bennett often said that his lifelong ambition was to create “a catalog of hits rather than hit records”. He released more than 70 albums, won 19 Grammys and enjoyed a deep and lasting affection from fans and fellow artists.
Feel good performer
Bennett did not tell his own story when he performed; Instead, he let the music do the talking, from the likes of Gershwin and Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Unlike his friend and mentor Sinatra, he would perform a song rather than embody it.
If his singing and his public life were lacking great Sinatra dramaBennett captivated with an easy, courtly manner and an unusually rich and enduring voice.
“I like to entertain the audience, to make them forget their problems,” he said in 2006. “I think people … are moved if they hear something that’s sincere and honest and maybe makes a little sense of the ‘humour… I like it to make people feel good when I perform.’
Bennett was often praised by his peers, but never more significantly than when Sinatra said in a 1965 Life magazine interview: “For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. It thrills me when I look at him. I move. He’s the singer who understands what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”
Not only did he survive the rise of rock music, but he endured so long and so well that he gained new fans and collaborators, some young enough to be his grandchildren. In 2014, at the age of 88, Bennett broke his own record as the oldest living performer with a #1 album on the Billboard 200 for ‘Cheek to Cheek’, his duet project with Lady Gaga.
For Bennett, who was one of the few performers who moved easily between pop and jazz, these collaborations were part of his crusade to expose new audiences to what he called the Great American Songbook.
“No country has given the world such great music,” Bennett said in a 2015 interview with Downbeat magazine. “Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern. These songs will never die.”
Paintings and portraits
In addition to singing, Bennett pursued his lifelong passion for painting by taking art classes and taking his sketchbook on the road. His paintings, signed with his family name Benedetto, including portraits of his musician friends and landscapes of Central Park, were displayed in public and private collections, including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
