All the Things You Are , livre ebook

CONTENTS
Introduction: Staying Real
Chapter 1: Beginnings
Chapter 2: A Young Man s Initiation
Chapter 3: I Was Lost, I Was Drifting
Chapter 4: An Alarm Clock in Church
Chapter 5: Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay
Chapter 6: Out of the Commonplace into the Rare
Chapter 7: Good-bye to All That
Chapter 8: A Quality That Lets You In
Chapter 9: A Pure, Simple Thing
Chapter 10: Renaissance
Chapter 11: A Partially Hidden Legacy
Chapter 12: The Next Century
Chapter 13: The Singing Waiter
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Awards, Albums, and Songs
Bibliography
Index

To Derek Boulton, Joe Soldo, Dini Evanier,
Andrew Blauner, Theodore Mitrani, Lenny Triola,
Nick Riggio, and Jerome H. Kogan
Copyright 2011 by David Evanier. All rights reserved
Photo credits: Page 56 top, 122, 213 top: courtesy of Nick Riggio; 56 bottom, 123 top, 125 bottom, 215 bottom, 296 bottom: photo by Derek Boulton; 123 bottom, 124, 125 top: photo by Ron Rolo; 213 bottom, 214 bottom, 215 top: photo by Fran Riggio; 214 top: New York Daily News; 216 top, 293, 294, 295 top, 296 top: courtesy of Mark Fox; 216 bottom: courtesy of Geri Tamburello; 295 bottom: photo by David Evanier.
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I wanted to be one of the keepers of the flame when it came to great music.
-Tony Bennett , The Good Life
Introduction
Staying Real
In 1966 Tony Bennett was singing Lost in the Stars at the Hollywood Bowl with Count Basie s band. A shooting star shot through the sky right over his head, astounding even a jaded Hollywood audience. The next morning Bennett s phone rang. It was Ray Charles, whom Bennett had never met up to that time, calling from New York. Charles said, Hey, Tony, how d you do that, man? and hung up.
In many ways Tony Bennett s life-his real last name, Benedetto, means blessed in Italian-has been a magical one, and some of his experiences over the years come as close to the celestial as a human life can aspire to. He has packed several lifetimes into his eighty-five years. The rebirth of Bennett generation after generation is amazing. He has never lost his sense of wonder, even as he has reached the pinnacle of a career that has kept him a huge star for more than sixty years, with sixty million record sales and fifteen Grammy Awards. In 2006 a television special, Tony Bennett: An American Classic , on NBC won multiple Emmy Awards. In 2009 Bennett signed a new $10 million recording contract with Columbia, the company that gave him his greatest early triumphs. His paintings have been accepted for the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., including his oil paintings Central Park and God Is Love , a stunning portrait of Duke Ellington with twelve red roses. The roses have a story of their own. Ellington would send a dozen roses to Bennett every time Bennett wrote a new song. The painting was the only one of his own Bennett hung in his home. When Bennett speaks about Duke, he could be describing himself: He was very consistent about being creative all day long. There wasn t a moment that he wasn t creative. When I was in his presence, he was creating something. At all times. The love was mutual. Ellington wrote in his autobiography that Tony Bennett is the most unselfish performing artist today.
He seems to have always been with us. He said on his eightieth birthday, I feel like Rip Van Winkle. He fought in World War II and helped to liberate a concentration camp. He became a top star with Because of You, which topped the charts in September 1951 and sold a million copies. He repeated that triumph in November of that year with Cold, Cold Heart, another gold record, and again and again after that. He marched at Selma. Vittorio De Sica, one of the greatest Italian filmmakers of all time, wanted to make a documentary about Bennett s life in the 1970s. It was not surprising that the foremost Italian humanist director should be drawn to the story of the poor Italian American boy with the warm, gruff street voice, whose passionate antifascism, antiracism, and pacifism were shaped by his experiences in the world war.
Today, at eighty-five, Bennett s charm, heart, technical facility, and sincerity have never relinquished their hold on the country. He stands at five feet nine, and his blue eyes still startle. He is extraordinarily handsome for a man of any age, and his is a classic Italian profile. His speaking voice remains virile, husky, with a strong touch of gravel, hickory smoke, and the streets of New York. His mind and heart seem to wrap around every song, and his husky voice seems to personalize a song as if it were an intimate encounter between singer and listener.
He is, astoundingly, a better singer than he ever was before, more melodic, more haunting. Writing of Bennett s performance in Philadelphia in August 2010, A. D. Amorosi wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer , I ve attended several Tony Bennett shows in the last 20 years, and I must report: Saturday night s sold-out Mann Center gig was his best. . . . The great triumph . . . was that, simply, Bennett never sounded finer-refined, tough, tender, more theatrical than ever, capable of crooning to the rafters without losing the nuanced phrasing he has developed.
Listening to more recent Bennett recordings, singer Ellen Martin says that the voice is different from the young voice, but he sings beautifully and with the same feeling. It s very penetrating, thoughtful, intense, and rich. He really does stay in the moment. It actually feels live, as if he hadn t worked out in advance how he was going to sing the end of the song. Because he s so connected with these life experiences and feelings, because he touches something in himself, it touches the same in us and we relate.
There are only a handful of performers in the history of show business who rise above all the other stars because they are not only great singers but also great entertainers: Sinatra, Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, George Burns, Dean Martin, Ray Charles, Fred Astaire, Al Jolson, and Tony Bennett. We are talking about the kind of magic-stardust-that transcends all fashions and trends, simply magic that will endure forever.
Bennett has a level of self-awareness that is hewn out of years of struggle and triumph. Sinatra, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie are among his primary influences. He is eager to admit the impact of others on his work. He told BBC2 in 1979, It wasn t stealing . . . it was what Stravinsky would have called sweet thievery. I was inspired by what I saw and heard, which is really expressing my love for my fellow artist. He has said that Count Basie s attitude became my philosophy: economy of line, keep it simple, keep it swingin .
Bennett and Sinatra, his idol, both tell a story from within. Neither of them is simply performing songs; they are living them. They are entirely different, except that each can surprise and be unpredictable.
Tony stood up, he was always driven and doing what he wanted to do, his niece, Nina Chiappa, told me. There s that Calabrese element there. I think it s a family trait that we re very tenacious but also very sensitive. Bennett s loyalty to Sinatra is based purely on his admiration of his talent. Nick Riggio, a lifelong friend of Tony who thinks that Tony is even better than Sinatra, recalls that Bennett has always bristled at that suggestion. Tony would get mad at me, he told me. He d always say, Sinatra invented the art of intimate singing.
There seems to be no trace of envy in Bennett s attitude toward Sinatra. Indeed, there is love. He is totally committed to the furtherance of the art. He wrote of Sinatra, I look at Sinatra as a musicologist would look at Mozart or Bach or Beethoven. . . . Everything Sinatra has ev