(New York) Legendary American singer Tony Bennett died on Friday, two weeks shy of his 97th birthday.
Publicist Sylvia Weiner confirmed Bennett’s death to The Associated Press, noting that he died in his hometown of New York. There is no specific cause, but the singer had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016.
Bennett leaves behind the memory of an eminent and timeless stylist whose devotion to classic American songs and talent for creating new standards such as I Left My Heart In San Francisco graced a decades-long career that earned him admirers ranging from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga.
The last of the great crooners of the mid-twentieth century, Bennett often stated that his lifelong ambition was to create “a hit catalog rather than hit records.” He released more than 70 albums, which earned him 19 Grammys in competition — all but two after he turned 60 — and enjoyed deep and lasting affection from his fans and fellow artists.
Bennett didn’t tell his own story when he performed; instead he let the music do the talking – the Gershwins and Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Unlike his friend and mentor Sinatra, he interpreted a song rather than embodying it.
While his singing and his public life lacked the dramatic intensity of Sinatra, Bennett appealed with his poise, courtly manners, and exceptionally rich, enduring voice—”a tenor that sings like a baritone,” he himself said—that made him a master of the caress of a ballad or the liveliness of a spirited piece.
“I like to entertain people, make them forget their problems,” he told The Associated Press in 2006. »
Bennett was often praised by his peers, but never so significantly as by Sinatra in a 1965 Life magazine interview: “To me, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. It excites me when I watch it. It moves me. It’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a bit more. »
He not only survived the rock music boom, but he endured so long and so well that he gained new fans and collaborators, some of whom are young enough to be his grandchildren.
In 2014, at the age of 88, Bennett broke his own record as the oldest living artist with a number 1 album on the Billboard 200 for Cheek to Cheek, his duet project with Lady Gaga.
Three years earlier, he had risen to the top of the charts with Duets II, which brought together contemporary stars such as Gaga, Carrie Underwood and Amy Winehouse, whose last studio recording it was.
His relationship with Amy Winehouse was immortalized in the Oscar-nominated documentary Amy, which shows Bennett patiently encouraging the insecure young singer during a performance of Body and Soul.
