[Dixielandjazz] Tony Bennett interviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

Tony Bennett interviewed

After 60 Years of Recording, Tony Bennett Is Still Selling Records and Winning New
Admirers
by Adam Sweeting
London Telegraph, April 14, 2010

As he likes to point out, Tony Bennett has been doing this a long time. "For 60 years
I've been recording, and most of the time I was criticised by the record company
because I didn't record enough hits," he protests. "But I kept recording these wonderful
songs and now they're thrilled with it. It seems that young people are starting to
get interested, and now the whole public is starting to discover them."
This rediscovery of classic American popular songs, and the attendant canonisation
of Bennett as the last of the legendary crooners who grew up singing them, isn't
as recent a phenomenon as he suggests. As long ago as 1994 he made a celebrated appearance
on MTV Unplugged which yielded a platinum-selling album that won him two Grammys,
and in 1998 he was acclaimed as the show-stopper of the Glastonbury festival.
But now that he's 83, the fact that he's still out there doing it, with a voice that
remains in astonishingly good nick, lends Bennett a poignant and slightly miraculous
aura. It's like going to Lord's and finding Don Bradman still at the crease.
This hasn't escaped the attention of Sony Music, who next week will release Volume
1 of Tony Bennett Sings the Ultimate American Songbook, a 21-song compilation sifted
from Bennett's immense catalogue. The luminaries of American song are represented,
from Cole Porter and Irving Berlin to George Gershwin and Jerome Kern. There's also
a Radio 2 tie-in via a four-part series called Tony Bennett Presents the Great American
Songbook, in which Michael Parkinson leads Bennett through his choice of 40 classic
songs.
"The record company want me to do an Ultimate American Songbook every year for four
years," he explains. "I like that premise, because it allows me to stay with great
music and not feel that it's finished and old and not wanted. The United States created
the best popular songs that were ever written and from the 1920s to the 1940s it
was a renaissance period. It stopped in 1950."
This peremptory judgment might cause us to accuse a less illustrious figure of blatant
"in-my-day" revisionism, but Bennett's credentials are gilt-edged. He knew all the
greats, whether it was Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole or Ella Fitzgerald, and when
he turned up in Arena's splendid film about singer and lyricist Johnny Mercer on
BBC Four recently, he was reminiscing about an old friend rather than merely offering
a second-hand opinion.
"Mercer was very clever," he says. "He knew the way Southerners spoke, and put that
into his lyrics. But in that whole era you had the best. Harold Arlen was just fantastic.
Cole Porter was better than anybody and Gershwin was Gershwin, y'know. Johnny Mercer
started Capitol Records and he brought in Sinatra, Dean Martin and Nat King Cole.
He just let them sing whatever they wanted and it became the best record company
in America."
With his Savile Row suits (he's an ardent Anglophile), respect for tradition and
enthusiasm for words like "quality" and "integrity", Bennett can seem like a walking
antique, but he has been a rebel in his own way, doggedly resisting attempts to turn
him into a mere commercial hack. He scored his first hits in 1951 with Because Of
You and Cold, Cold Heart, which launched his career on an upward trajectory that
stretched into the late Sixties. His 1962 classic I Left My Heart in San Francisco
"institutionalised me throughout the United States", as he puts it.
But the rock and pop revolution of the Sixties eclipsed the jazz music he loved and
the kind of songs that had defined Bennett's career, and Columbia Records pressurised
him to record contemporary pop hits. The final straw was his 1970 album Tony Sings
the Great Hits of Today!, a commercial and artistic catastrophe. It prompted a split
with Columbia, and while Bennett experimented with his own label, Improv, and cut
a pair of well-received albums with jazz pianist Bill Evans, the end of the Seventies
found him without a record deal and facing career burn-out. A cocaine habit didn't
help.
Bennett strenuously plays down this low period now, insisting that he came to England
and found a new lease of life collaborating with composer and arranger Robert Farnon.
"Columbia promoted the idea that my career went down and my records stopped selling,"
he claims. "I had the greatest time of my life in England for a couple of years,
and Robert Farnon made some of the best music I've ever been around."
But he's happy to give credit to his son Danny for stepping in as his manager and
transforming his fortunes. Danny moved his dad back to New York, sorted out his tax
problems, and negotiated a new deal with Columbia. "Thank God for my son Danny,"
says Bennett. "He was so brilliant as a businessman that he talked them into leaving
me alone and letting me record properly, without them telling me what to do. The
minute we did that, my career just zoomed up again." Thus, the venerable Bennett
is now selling heaps of CDs just as the record industry teeters on the brink. Like
his friend Sinatra, he did it his way. "I love it," he declares. "I'm in good shape,
and everybody's saying I never sang better. I'm selling more records than anyone
else on Columbia. It's unbelievable!"


--Bob Ringwald
Amateur (ham) Radio call sign K6YBV
rsr at ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
916/806-9551

Advice for new musicians:
1.  Never be a mug at the bar. 
2.  Don't hang around with chorus-girls as they'll spend your money quicker than you can earn it.
(And the most important of them all)
3.  Never trust a drum break!