Over the course of Tony Bennett’s 71-year career, pop music changed beyond recognition. At one end of it, his first No 1 single Because Of You was displaced from the top of the US charts by his second No 1 single, a cover of Cold Cold Heart by Hank Williams, then not a mythic, long-lost figure – the fabled King of Country - but still very much alive and recording. At the other, he released an album of duets with Lady Gaga.
But Tony Bennett didn’t change, or at least not much: his career was an object lesson in the virtues of standing still, of knowing where your talent lay and trusting that it was strong enough to transcend the vagaries of fashion.
It wasn’t that Bennett was unwilling to take risks or experiment: covering a Hank Williams honky-tonk song was simply not the kind of thing that suave, Queens-born pop stars did in 1951, while the versions of Lullaby of Broadway or Let’s Face the Music and Dance on 1957’s The Beat of My Heart album were surprisingly stripped-back and stark, with the focus of the sound more on a battalion of percussionists that included Art Blakey than on the brass or piano. But he seldom chased trends, or moved with the times, at least artistically.
On the rare occasions when he was inveigled into doing so, it never ended well, as when, in the early 70s, his then-record label forced him into recording Stevie Wonder and Lennon & McCartney songs and released them as Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today!, an album with a cod-psychedelic sleeve that looked not unlike the cover of the Beatles’ A Collection of Oldies… But Goldies! He subsequently claimed that the process of making it caused him to become “physically nauseous … I actually regurgitated”.
Bennett knew he was better off making the music he wanted to make – his warm tenor voice singing showtunes and selections from the Great American Songbook and allowing his love of jazz to influence the arrangements – while letting tastes shift and change around him, confident that people would eventually come around to his way of thinking, even if he had to start his own record label in order to do it. He was right. Towards the end of his career, far younger artists were queuing up to record with him: George Michael, John Legend, Mariah Carey and Amy Winehouse among them.
By then, people were openly questioning how a man of his age kept up the work schedule he did. He released six albums while in his 80s, and toured incessantly: in 2014, the year he turned 88, Bennett played more than 70 live shows. But then, Bennett learned the value of hard work early on: before serving in the second world war, he supported himself working as a singing waiter; following the war, and after being spotted by the comedian Bob Hope, he played seven shows a day at New York’s Paramount theatre. He worked hard to ensure his first flush of fame didn’t end with the arrival of rock’n’roll. His pianist and musical director, Ralph Sharon, encouraged him to abandon pop and novelty songs and follow an increasingly jazz-oriented path: he recorded two great albums with the Count Basie Orchestra in 1958 and 59; recorded the haunting, percussion-free Alone Together the following year and released his most celebrated single, I Left My Heart in San Francisco, in 1962.
But by the end of the decade, his record company seemed convinced that his commercial standing had been affected by the rise of rock music, although, in truth, the facts that Sharon had jumped ship, that Bennett was contractually obliged to make three albums a year and that the quality of his output was understandably suffering as a result might have had more to do with it.
Clearly noting the way that Frank Sinatra had expanded his repertoire to include songs by Jimmy Webb, Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon on his gold-selling albums Cycles and My Way, they insisted Bennett try something similar, even down to recording some of the same material Sinatra essayed: Bobby Russell’s Little Green Apples, George Harrison’s Something. The resulting albums were a disaster, and there was something gleeful and defiant about the way Bennett subsequently retrenched himself, launching his own label Improv with Life Is Beautiful, an album heavy on the Cole Porter and Rogers & Hart. But Improv quickly collapsed, Bennett’s live bookings dried up and he developed an addiction to cocaine: by the start of the 80s, he was, by his own admission, “lost”.
It took the intervention of his son Danny to restart his career. He became his father’s manager, got him gigs in colleges that took him away from the Vegas image and masterminded his 1986 album The Art of Excellence, which reunited him with Ralph Sharon and returned him to the charts. He posed in a leather jacket on its cover, but inside, all was business as usual: even a cover of James Taylor’s 1976 album track Everybody Has the Blues, sung as a duet with Ray Charles, sounded like it had been beamed direct from an after-hours club in 1957.
His resurgence was sealed with a celebrated performance on MTV Unplugged in 1994. In truth, Bennett was no more unplugged than usual, performing I Left My Heart in San Francisco, Fly Me to the Moon et al with the Ralph Sharon Trio, but getting him on MTV at the height of grunge was no mean feat: the resulting album went platinum and won an album of the year Grammy.
From that point on, Bennett’s career and standing never faltered. He performed at Glastonbury and continued to make great records, often in conjunction with others. 2002’s A Wonderful World, recorded with kd lang, was an understated triumph, while his Duets albums – which he insisted on recording live, with the guest performers present – were wildly successful. Bennett might well have derived a small glow of satisfaction from the fact that the guest list included both Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney, artists he’d once been wrongly advised to follow, now paying homage.
Indeed, when he and Lady Gaga recorded 2014’s Cheek to Cheek together, it felt less like a young artist bringing a certain hip cachet to a man approaching 90, and more like a masterful performer in the autumn of his years bestowing a certain timeless class, credibility and experience – the result of seven decades spent sticking to his guns – on a singer in her 20s.
