Tony Bennett, an entertainer described by Frank Sinatra (an egocentric not noted for the lavishness of his public assessments of rival talents) as “the greatest ballad singer of them all,” last week signed a form which made him a Friend of the Tate Gallery. I happened to be present at this event, having been invited to observe Mr Bennett while being photographed for a television series, the format of which is centred upon his amiable art, entitled This Is Music.
It was an eye-opener. For more years than I care to remember, I have found myself at the receiving end of Mr Bennett’s voice. Not only have I left my heart (and more besides) in San Francisco, I have listened lonely to the pops on acoustically dubious transistors in motels and dumps and dives and flophouses and presidential suites in alien places the world over, as well as on long drives when the car radio was my sole contact between isolation and the world of public events.
On all these occasions I have tended to take Mr Bennett for granted. At best, as a saloon singer with an engaging flair for evoking sentimental, even trite, melodic and balladistic images; at worst, a tap to be turned on for background accompaniment to my own sensual daydreams, as a form of quasionanistic muzak.
A confrontation with Tony Bennett, in the flesh, tends to disturb such preconception. He is unlike his television or concert hall or nightclub image. Soft spoken, emotionally well contained, almost diffident, he speaks with a quietly modulated New York accent and with extreme reserve and almost total absence of emphasis or flamboyancy of gesture. He is smaller than one expects him to be, relaxed, compact, with the inner poise of, say, Lester Piggott.
When the cameras were inactive, we moved together in complete silence through the Blake and Hogarth exhibitions. An hour or so later, when we returned to his high luxury flat in Grosvenor Square, he told me that, in his youth, he had studied commercial art at a vocational high school opposite the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
Since then, he says, he has carried about with him his basic set of painting tools, and, over the years, he has sketched and painted the world around him in vast portfolios in which are recorded hundreds of impressions, from landscapes and city skylines to small boats and power stations and barns and animals and the varied cross-sections of people he has met.
But it’s on popular music that he begins to be authoritative. “I was brought up in New York, around Astoria, where Louis Armstrong then lived. It was the beginning of the mechanical age of show business. Bing Crosby had made a big impact on radio and in motion pictures. I identified with the kind of music that was being put over on the film and radio media, feeling that somehow, I was on this wavelength.
“I listened to all forms of music but was not particularly conscious of wishing to make any personal contribution as a solo singer. I just enjoyed singing, and listening to music, but I didn’t have any big ideas of getting up there with the Crosby and other star singers of that period. I was a librarian in the Armed Forces Network after the war was over. We supplied musical scores for a big 45-piece orchestra and I began to sing a few songs that way. It was my only experience of big-band singing for some time. When I completed my service I studied at the American Theatre Wing, in New York, under the GI Bill of Rights. Then there was the period as an art student.
“At weekends I sat in as a singer with neighbourhood jazz groups. Musicians like Zoot Sims and Al Cohn allowed me to get up on stage with them. This type of musician does not, as a rule, like amateurs, but it seems they sensed I had something. It was a start. In this way Pearl Bailey heard me and booked me to appear in her show at the Greenwich Village Inn. One night Bob Hope came in, caught my performance, and took me on tour with him. It was then that I was asked to change my name, since promoters considered my full name, Anthony Dominick Benedetto, too long to go up on the theatre marquees.
“The first song I recorded was Boulevard of Broken Dreams; it was only a semi-hit but allowed me to play the Middle West and, so to speak, keep things moving. My next recording was Because of You, a massive hit. It was up there and stayed there for a year. It bugged everybody in the music business. But, of course, the biggest hit, the one that put me across internationally, was I Left My Heart in San Francisco, and that really set me up.”
Bennett foresees a change in direction in popular music in the near future; something of a reversal, perhaps, a return to melodic harmonies, well constructed lyrics, depth of tone, and more complex orchestration. “We have been going through a no-art period,” he says. “In America the musical trade papers are hinting, starting to admit, that the promoters, the musical establishment in the popular field, have concentrated too much on rock.”
With Sinatra retired, he is unquestionably the predominant figure in popular music both as a singer of ballads and an acute musical artist. He currently has 53 albums on brisk sale around the world and his present activities in London cannot fail to enlarge his range and musical influence.
