[Dixielandjazz] "You were right Pops." - Tony Bennett

[Steve Barbone]

Note especially the last three paragraphs. "Marketing and artistry" tied
together in a thematic approach to his album releases. e.g. The album title
(theme) describes exactly what you are going to hear and the theme is
relevant in that it references people/events still within current memory of
today's mass audience.

At 80, Tony Bennett is Relevant.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


August 2, 2006 - NY TIMES - Critic¹s Notebook - By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Tony Bennett at 80, Keeping the Flame

A quintessential Tony Bennett moment comes at the end of ³It¹s a Wonderful
World,² the tender duet he recorded with K. D. Lang for their 2002 Louis
Armstrong tribute album, ³A Wonderful World.² After they swap greeting-card
doggerel celebrating ³trees of green,² ³skies of blue² and ³clouds of
white,² Mr. Bennett remarks with a boyish enthusiasm, ³Don¹t you think
Satchmo was right?²

Ms. Lang responds by crooning a final, dreamy ³what a wonderful world,²
whereupon her partner, speaking in the quiet, choked-up voice of a man
visiting the grave of a beloved father figure, declares, ³You were right,
Pops.² 

This gentle burst of affirmation melts your heart and reminds you that
sincerity, a mode of expression that has been twisted, trampled, co-opted
and corrupted in countless ways by the false intimacy of television, still
exists in American popular culture. It can even salvage ³trees of green,²
³skies of blue² and ³clouds of white² from the junk heap of pop inanity.

Mr. Bennett, who turns 80 tomorrow, has steadfastly remained the embodiment
of heart in popular music. He pours it into every note he sings and every
phrase he swings with a sophistication that deepens his unguarded emotional
directness. In the polluted sea of irony, bad faith and grotesque
attitudinizing that pop music has become, he is a rock of integrity.

That integrity has carried him through the ups, downs and ups of a musical
career that now spans more than half a century. After the death of Frank
Sinatra in 1998, Mr. Bennett immediately became the leading caretaker of the
literate American song tradition that runs from Kern to Ellington to
Rodgers. You couldn¹t ask for a more reverent keeper of the flame.

Careers that last as long and have been as distinguished as Mr. Bennett¹s
have something to tell us about collective cultural experience over decades.
It has been said that Sinatra¹s journey from skinny, starry-eyed ³Frankie,²
strewing hearts and flowers, to the imperious, volatile Chairman of the
Board roughly parallels an American loss of innocence. As Sinatra entered
his noir period in the mid-1950¹s, his romantic faith gave way to a
soul-searching existentialism that yielded the most psychologically complex
popular music ever recorded. Following a similar arc, the country grew from
a nation of hungry dreamers fleeing the Depression and fighting ³the good
war² into an arrogant empire drunk on power and angry at the failure of the
American dream to bring utopia.

Mr. Bennett is something else altogether. A native New Yorker and man of the
people, he never strayed far from his working-class roots in Astoria,
Queens, where he was born Anthony Benedetto. Although he came out of the
same tradition of Mediterranean balladry as Sinatra, he retained the
innocence and joie de vivre of his youth. Disappointment is not in his
vocabulary. We don¹t go to him for psychological complexity, but for
refreshment and reassurance that life is good.

Believing in the power of art to ennoble ordinary lives, he sings what he
feels with a rare mixture of humility and pride: humility in the face of the
daunting popular-song tradition he treasures and pride that he is recognized
as its custodian. Gratitude and joy, gruffness and beauty balance each other
perfectly in singing that has grown more rhythmically acute with each
passing year.

To attend a Tony Bennett concert is to find yourself in the presence of a
performer who exudes a rough-hewn natural elegance, devoid of airs. Singing
a song like ³Mood Indigo,² he transmutes its sadness into the exuberance of
a man who acknowledges having the blues but embraces resilience. He can
still end a song like ³Fly Me to the Moon² or ³How Do You Keep the Music
Playing?² with an old-fashioned, quasi-operatic crescendo, but he makes
these corny triumphal endings stick in your heart.

Late next month, Columbia Records will release ³Tony Bennett: Duets/An
American Classic,² which includes 18 of his old hits and favorite album cuts
rerecorded with everybody from Bono (³I Wanna Be Around²) to Tim McGraw
(³Cold, Cold Heart²). The album belongs to the dubious Grammy-seeking
category of event records that includes ³Frank Sinatra Duets² and Ray
Charles¹s ³Genius Loves Company,² albums that aren¹t about interpreting
songs but are about pop royalty putting on a show of chumminess while
strutting arm in arm down the red carpet.

Everyone involved in these orgies of mutual admiration pretends for the
moment that there are no ethnic, generational or stylistic boundaries in
music. Mr. Bennett handles his chores on ³Duets² with a casual, offhand
grace that goes a long way toward undercutting the ceremonial pretensions.

It is an official marker in a career that can be divided into three phases.
The first is defined by four early-50¹s hits: ³Because of You,² ³Cold, Cold
Heart,² ³Blue Velvet² and ³Stranger in Paradise,² which stand as the
gorgeous final flowering of the high-romantic style invented in the 40¹s by
Sinatra and his arranger, Axel Stordahl. Pure and throbbing, Mr. Bennett¹s
voice adds a semioperatic heft to Sinatra¹s more intimate crooning style.
Male pop singing since then has never been this unabashedly sweet.

Phase two began in 1962 with the hit ³I Left My Heart in San Francisco,²
which rejuvenated Mr. Bennett¹s flagging career. Singing songs like ³I Wanna
Be Around,² ³The Good Life² and ³The Shadow of Your Smile,² the 30-something
singer infused these more adult, bittersweet ballads with a current of
worldly nostalgia. 

At the end of the 1960¹s, Mr. Bennett, like many of his peers, became an
instant relic rudely shoved to the perimeter of the pop marketplace in the
vindictive generational coup that thrust rock to the forefront of American
pop. Leaving Columbia Records in 1972, he spent the next decade and a half
in semi-exile, recording excellent but obscure albums (including two
mid-70¹s masterpieces with Bill Evans) for smaller labels before returning
to Columbia Records in 1986.

Mr. Bennett¹s resurgence under the management of his son Danny has been a
double-barreled triumph of marketing and artistry: of marketing in the case
of his ³MTV Unplugged² record, which shrewdly cast him as an avuncular elder
statesman of rock and won him the Grammy for album of the year in 1995, and
of artistry in the deluge of lovingly conceived and executed tribute albums
he has put out over the last decade and a half.

Those records include ³Perfectly Frank² (a Sinatra tribute), ³Steppin¹ Out²
(Fred Astaire), ³On Holiday² (Billie Holiday), ³Hot and Cool: Bennett Sings
Ellington,² ³Playin¹ With My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues²
(easy-listening pop-blues duets performed with stars like B. B. King, Ray
Charles and Bonnie Raitt) and ³Here¹s to the Ladies² (his versions of the
signature songs of 17 women, from Mabel Mercer and Blossom Dearie to Sarah
Vaughan and Barbra Streisand).

This legacy equals Ella Fitzgerald¹s Songbook albums of the 50¹s and 60¹s,
which were instrumental in codifying the American songbook. These albums
honor the performers as well as the music they recorded. Listen to any or
all of them, and you may find yourself nodding your head and agreeing with
Mr. Bennett: ³You were right, Pops.²