“For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,” no less than Frank Sinatra told Life magazine in 1965. “He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the c.
“For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,” no less than Frank Sinatra told Life magazine in 1965. “He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”
Bennett passed away on Friday at the age of 96, following a seven-year battle with Alzheimer’s.
For a guy who launched his recording career in the early ’50s, singing alongside American Songbook masters like Count Basie, Ray Conniff, Ralph Burns, and so many more, Bennett enjoyed a remarkably long and varied recording career. Partly that’s because Bennett had a timeless jazz sensibility, but also because he invested himself in the lyric of a song — even standards audiences had already heard a thousand other times by dozens of other singers — as few others could.
But by the mid-’70s, the times had passed him by. By the ’80s, he was nearly broke and in debt to the IRS. Just before the ’90s got rolling, thanks to new management from his son, Danny, Bennett enjoyed a resurgence in sales and popularity.
