Tony Bennett is back in an awfully big way after years in which his distinctive jazz/crooner style was appreciated mainly by nostalgics. Now 80, the man Sinatra called 'the best' has released an album of duets with contemporary artists - including some practitioners of the formerly despised rock'n'roll, writes Brian Boyd
OST of today's duet albums, particularly the ones featuring heavy hitters, are anything but two singers combining in harmony. Usually, one vocal track is recorded in Los Angeles and one somewhere in Europe, and the two people singing such intimate lyrics to each other have never met.
For Tony Bennett's Duets: An American Classic, the album brought out to celebrate his 80th birthday, the singer was having none of this technological trickery. Bennett insisted that all the singers should physically present in the studio during the recordings and all the singing should be done live as the band was playing. The collaborators - among them Paul McCartney, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Barbara Streisand, Bono and Sting - didn't cavil.
"I was a bit apprehensive about stipulating that these must be real duets," says Bennett. "I am from the tradition that you do everything in at most three or four takes, but with these younger acts, I believe that it can take them two years to do an album - and then they spend another few weeks fiddling around with the piano sound. I was worried that we would clash over that. But, as it turned out, most of the songs were done the way I like to do them and the duet with Elton John, Rags to Riches, was done in one take."
Bennett admits he's always had a bit of a problem with rock artists. He thinks this stems back to the late 1960s, when his career was going nowhere. He was pressurised into recording "contemporary" songs and, on the lamentable Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today! - on which he covered Beatles tracks - he is palpably ill at ease with the rock idiom.
"I grew up worshipping the greats: Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole and Fats Waller, and there was a real standard of musicianship there," he says. "Music was for everyone, and it wasn't like a fashion statement in those days. All those old jazz guys, they were completely being themselves, but I think what you saw when The Rolling Stones came along was that ever other act started to dress like them and sound like them. And you get that still in the rap music scene today."
"For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business," Frank Sinatra said back in 1965. "He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more."
Born Tony Benedetto in New York in 1926, Bennett is universally acknowledged as one of the best ever interpretative singers. He grew up listening to Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor and Louis Armstrong and has been singing since the age of 10. His early professional career was interrupted when he was drafted during the second World War. As an infantryman he fought on the front lines and was involved in the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp.
Although known as a crooner early on, Bennett was always at pains to emphasis his jazz leanings. "Jazz had a huge impact on my phrasing. I still think that jazz is one of the great cultural contributions. Something I learned early on from jazz music was that it is always more important to have a hit catalogue rather than a hit record".
Bennett's global hits from the '60s (I Left My Heart in San Francisco, I Wanna Be Around, The Good Life, The Shadow of Your Smile) were quickly forgotten when the rock/beat explosion swept the US in the latter half of the decade, and he found himself marginalised.
"There was nothing there for me," he says. "This wasn't a good time for people who were influenced by Duke Ellington. There was a big change in the record companies at this time, too, and it seemed like people didn't want to hear the music I was making."
His resurrection came courtesy of the Great American Songbook. "Whatever trends are happening in music, there's always great timeless songs out there by Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington and Cole Porter. When I relaunched myself, so to speak, it was important to me that I didn't change my image, didn't change the way I looked or didn't change the way that I sang. I kept wearing the tuxedo! I found that all these great songs I was doing were finding favour with a younger audience, and I was doing shows such as Letterman and The Simpsons."
MTV completed the story. After appearing at a video awards show on the same bill as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bennett was signed up to record his MTV Unplugged album, which became one of his biggest hits.
"That was a big surprise and I suppose it just shows that the era I come from still appealed. And I think it's down to the technique. I remember having a conversation with this guy years ago and he was saying, 'you and Bing Crosby aren't real singers, you have to use microphones. Al Jolson could hit the back of the house without using a microphone.' Ever since then I've always done one song in the live show without using a microphone, just to show that I can do it."
On Duets, there is still one song that Bennett sings solo: I Left My Heart in San Francisco. "With all the other songs I had somebody in mind to sing with. But with that one, I just left it alone. I was really astonished with all the big names that agreed to do it and all of them brought their own soul and sensibility to their performances.
"I was particularly impressed with the younger acts, people such as John Legend. And it was great to rework For Once in My Life with Stevie Wonder. And on Lullaby of Broadway with the Dixie Chicks, I did a swing version of the song which, for them being mostly country, was surprising. Now they want to do more swing records."
The only person he couldn't get was Madonna. "I wanted her to duet on I Ain't Got Nobody but she wasn't available. It's a pity because I think she really is one of a kind."
Bennett made an appearance a few weeks ago on The X Factor but is concerned about how such TV programmes raise the expectations of the performers.
"I know it sounds strange coming from me, because early on I got a break from coming second in an amateur singing contest on a radio show. But what concerns me about these shows is how they try and make the contestants get to the very top without breaking them in. I had all the little theatres and clubs to perform but these types of performers aren't being allowed to learn how to do it properly. They have to hit big with their first release or they're finished."
His views on rock music have shifted slightly over the years, due in some part to how he has been accepted by the rock audience.
"The reason I disliked rock in the first place was because Alan Freed [the pioneering rock'n'roll DJ] used to say that 'this is our music and it's not for anyone else', which I thought made no sense. It seemed to break up the whole music world. I used to play gigs at the Paramount in New York a - number of gigs a day - to all different age groups. Even when I was told that my style wasn't the fashion of the day, I stuck with it. You did get great artists such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but a lot of the other acts didn't last.
"I see myself as the anti-demographic performer. There's something there for everyone."
Tony Bennett: Duets - An American Classic is available now
