But he sang them with a lot of different people, The Boss told me, as he played me Bennett’s version of Body and Soul with Amy Winehouse — last sung with her in London just four months before she died, at 27.
He thought Amy Winehouse a true jazz artist, up there with Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.
At his farewell concerts in 2021, Bennett sang Cheek to Cheek with Lady Gaga, and The Boss insisted on playing that one too, along with his duets with everyone from Ray Charles, Paul McCartney and Elton John to Diana Krall, Barbra Streisand and k.d.lang.
Bennett had his first number one hit way back in 1951, which The Boss seems to think was a significant year. In 1962, he recorded I Left My Heart in San Francisco, which became his signature tune; the San Francisco Giants still sing it every time they win a game, and there’s a statue of Tony outside the city’s Fairmont Hotel.
Bennett had fought at the Battle of the Bulge in World War II and, in Germany after the war, bumped into a black American friend from New York, joining him for a Thanksgiving dinner. His commanding officer reprimanded him and transferred him to another unit.
Bennett became a lifelong liberal democrat and marched in the civil rights marches from Selma to Birmingham; he performed with Sammy Davis Jr at the Stars for Freedom rally outside Montgomery the night before Martin Luther King Jr delivered his famous ‘How long?’ speech, in 1965.
In the 1970s, Bennett resisted as record companies urged him to sing the hits of the ’70s: he set up his own record company and produced his two most critically acclaimed albums, both with jazz pianist Bill Evans, in 1975 and 1977.
He was emerging from a cocaine habit when Evans died in 1980 and often recalled the last words Evans said to him the day he died: “Just concentrate on truth and beauty.”
He stuck to the American songbook he loved and by the mid-1980s he was in demand again. He was still doing 70 shows a year into his 90s, still practising his scales for 20 minutes a day: “The first day you don’t do scales, you know. The second day, the musicians know. The third day, the audience knows,” Bennett used to say.
While his great influences were Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Sinatra tipped his hat to Bennett and called him “the best singer in the business”. The critic and composer Alec Wilder said about Bennett’s voice: “There is a quality about it that lets you in.”
The Boss’s favourite story about Tony Bennett concerns the time when Bennett was singing Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars at the Hollywood Bowl with Count Basie’s band and Buddy Rich on drums — when a shooting start fell across the sky, right over the stage.
The next morning, everyone was talking about it and it was all over the newspapers. Bennett recalled, “The phone rang and it was Ray Charles, who I’d not yet met, calling me from New York. He said, ‘Hey Tony, how’d you do that, man?’ And hung up.”
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