© -
Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“Jazz has always drawn on
popular music for material, while at the same time influencing it. George
Gershwin, Harold Arlen, and many other composers for Broadway and Tin Pan Alley
have reflected that influence, along with many of the singers of their songs,
among them Lee Wiley and Frank Sinatra. None has been more deeply affected by
jazz than Tony Bennett, whose reverence for Louis Armstrong is manifest even in
his vibrato.
Tony doesn't consider himself
a jazz artist. Many of the jazz musicians who have worked with him would
disagree, and the way he phrases, the way he feels time, the passion, the
intensity of his work all reflect his love of jazz and commitment to the music.
…
Tony considers that his
finishing school was the Count Basie band, with which he toured. He always
works with jazz musicians, and he recorded two exceptional albums with the
late Bill Evans.
The creative passion often
manifests itself in more than one art, and a number of jazz musicians—Miles
Davis, Mel Powell, George Wettling, John Heard — have been capable and, in
some cases, excellent painters. Tony's oils sell for large sums.”
- Gene Lees
It is always cause
for celebration when we feature more of Whitney Balliett’s beautifully crafted
Jazz writings on these pages.
On this occasion,
Whitney gives us a look at the early career of Tony Bennett in his Alec Wilder & His Friends,
The Words and Sounds of … [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974].
The other artists
whose “words and sounds” are the subject of Whitney’s pen in this book are
Marian McPartland, Mabel Mercer, Bobby Hackett, Ruby Braff, [radio comedians]
Bob and Ray, Blossom Dearie and Alec Wilder.
No one has ever
written about Jazz more astutely and more eloquently than Mr. Balliett, nor has
anyone written about it with more humility than Mr. Balliett who once said: “A
critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste, but
intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and
a critic’s prejudices.”
© -
Whitney Balliett, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“As a child of
radio and the Victrola, of the microphone and the recording, I have been
listening most of my life to American popular singers, and their number and
variety are astonishing and almost endless. Their names, which form an American
mythology, come easily to mind: Russ Columbo, Whispering Jack Smith, Gene
Austin, Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, Sophie Tucker, Arthur Tracy, Al
Jolson, Kate Smith, Rudy Vallee, Bessie Smith, Fred Astaire, Louis Armstrong,
Mildred Bailey, Red McKenzie, Ivie Anderson, Ethel Waters, Bing Crosby, Ella
Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Tony Martin, Ethel Merman, Johnny Mercer, Jack
Teagarden, Dick Haymes, Josh White, Joe Turner, Jimmy Rushing, Mabel Mercer,
the Boswell Sisters, the Andrews Sisters, the Mills Brothers, the Ink Spots,
the Golden Gate Quartette, Helen Humes, Mary Martin, Ray Nance, Paul Robeson,
Maxine Sullivan, Lee Wiley, Bob Eberly, Ray Eberle, Helen O'Connell, Woody
Guthrie, Gene Autry, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, Eddy Arnold, Noble Sissle,
Richard Dyer-Bennet, Helen Ward, Morton Downey, Martha Tilton, Helen Forrest,
Frank Sinatra, Georgia Gibbs, Nat King Cole, Hoagy Carmichael,
Anita O'Day, Kenny Baker, June Christy, Eddie Fisher, Frankie Laine, Vaughn
Monroe, Frances Lang-ford, Sylvia Syms, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney,
Lead-belly, Judy Garland, Dinah Shore, Billy Eckstine, Eartha Kitt, Buddy
Greco, Peggy Lee, Harry Belafonte, Anita Ellis, Bo Diddley, Elvis Presley, Lena
Home, Doris Day, Pearl Bailey, Perry Como, Margaret Whiting, Mel Torme, Jo
Stafford, Tony Bennett, Blossom Dearie, Teddi King, Kay Starr, Patti Page,
Carmen McRae, Jackie Cain and Roy Krai, Teresa Brewer, Dean Martin, Sarah
Vaughan, Ray Charles, Mahalia Jackson, Bobby Short, Helen Merrill, Stella
Brooks, Dinah Washington, Chris Connor, Andy Williams, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gorme,
Dionne Warwick, James Brown, B. B. King, Aretha Franklin, Joan Baez, Barbra
Streisand, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Glen Campbell, and Roberta
Flack. They have, in the past forty years, become ubiquitous — on the radio, on
records, on jukeboxes, in the movies, on the stage, in nightclubs, on
television, and in concert halls. Indeed, they have created, as a huge,
ceaselessly moving and changing body of troubadours, the most pervasive and
familiar sounds in American life. Many are famous, and some are among the most
famous people of this century. Few adults in the western world are unaware of
Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland and Nat King Cole and Tony
Bennett and of the anthem status they have, respectively, given such songs as
"White Christmas," "I'll Never Smile Again," "Over the
Rainbow," "Nature Boy," and "I Left My Heart in San
Francisco." One of the reasons for this unique, engulfing outpouring of
song was the invention of the microphone, which, together with its handmaidens, radio
and the recording, made two things possible: omnipresent singing, and a
successful singing career without a voice.
(Since then, a couple of generations of "microphone" singers
have come along.
Take away their
mikes, and by and large their voices vanish.
Some notable examples: Blossom Dearie, Mel Torme, Mildred Bailey, and
Chris Connor.)
Another was the
appearance in the tens and twenties and thirties of the first great American
songwriters, such as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen,
Cole Porter, and George Gershwin; the lives of their countless marvelous songs
were wholly dependent on being performed, and so a new and insatiable demand
for more and better singers arose. Still another reason was our old habit of
letting off excess emotional and romantic steam through singing. (Never has there been more singing in this
country than during the Depression and the Second World War.) Consider the minstrel singers, the
cowboys, the slaves who first sang
blues and spirituals, the young women
who got off the latest Stephen Foster in the parlor of an evening, the
hillbilly singers, the Irish and Neapolitan tenors, and the light classical
singers such as John McCormack and Lawrence Tibbett. The first microphone singers
were the crooners, who, with their patent-leather baritones and oily vibratos,
evolved from the basically European singing of the McCormacks and Tibbetts in
the twenties. And out of the crooners came Bing Crosby, who, cutting the silver
cord to Europe, almost by himself invented American
popular singing.
American popular
singers range from the consummate to the regrettable. Ella Fitzgerald can do anything with her
voice, while Vaughn Monroe was bathetic. Most of them, though, share certain
characteristics. Their voices tend to be homemade and friendly — the kind you
feel like squeezing or shaking hands with. Their intonation is often weak and
their breathing uncertain. Their phrases sometimes dangle. Their voices, which
rarely have much coloration, are a complex mixture of cheerful intent, emotion,
electronics, and bravado. But the popular singer's lack of technical aplomb is
his great virtue, for it allows him to sing Kern and Porter and Gershwin as no
highly trained singer can. Ezio Pinza oversang Richard Rodgers, while Tony
Bennett undersings him in such a way that Rodgers' superb melodies seem to come
to life on their own. Pinza inflated Rodgers' songs, but Bennett illuminates
and aerates them.
Bing Crosby was
the first popular singer to learn this trick, and he did it in large part by
listening to jazz musicians. He listened to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington
(he recorded "St. Louis Blues" with Ellington in 1932), and he was
tutored by Mildred Bailey when he was one of Paul Whiteman's Rhythm Boys. He
hung out in Chicago with Bix Beiderbecke and Jimmy McPartland. He learned to sing
legato, to phrase in a "lazy" fashion. He learned rubato and the ornamental,
open-glottal notes — the "aaums" and "oowoos" — that made
every phrase he sang sound as if it started with a vowel. The great
instrumentalists like Beiderbecke "sing" on their horns, and through
them he was taught to flow melodically. He learned to make his comfortable,
front-porch baritone appear capacious and important. In turn, he taught a
generation of popular singers.
The best of them
was Frank Sinatra. Sinatra had also listened to Armstrong and Mildred Bailey,
but he had, as well, grown up on Billie Holiday and Mabel Mercer. (Popular
singers such as Billie Holiday are in effect jazz singers, and are more like
instrumentalists than vocalists. They use their materials not as harmonic and
melodic maps but as departure points for elaborate, hornlike improvisations.)
Sinatra was a more serious singer than Crosby, whose offhandedness sometimes gave him
an absentminded quality. At the outset of his career, Sinatra sang with Tommy
Dorsey's band, and Dorsey, a lyrical player of the first order, taught him — in
Dorsey's words — how to "drive a ballad." Sinatra's ballads, freed of
Crosby's ornamentation and reverberative effects,
took on an almost hymnlike dimension. He believed
the lyrics he sang, and he delivered them with an intense, clean
articulation. His voice was smaller and lighter than Crosby's, but his phrasing and immaculate sense
of timing gave it a poise and stature Crosby's lacked.
Sinatra, in his
turn, brought along another generation of popular singers, and the best of them
is Tony Bennett. Indeed, Bennett has become the most widely admired American
popular singer. Alec Wilder, who has known Bennett for twenty-five years,
recently wrote, "The list of 'believers' isn't very long. But those who
are on it are very special people. Among them, certainly, is Tony Bennett. But
first I should say what I mean by a believer. He is one whose sights stay high,
who makes as few concessions as he can, whose ideals will not permit him to
follow false trails or fashions for notoriety's or security's sake, who takes
chances, who seeks to convey, by whatever means, his affections and
convictions, and who has faith in the power of beauty to survive, no matter how
much squalor and ugliness seek to suppress it. I am close enough to him to know
that his insistence on maintaining his musical convictions has been far from
easy. His effervescent delight in bringing to his audiences the best songs, the
best musicians, the best of his singing and showmanship is apparent to anyone
who has the good sense to listen to him in person or on records."
Wilder went on to
ponder Bennett's singing: "There is a quality about it that lets you in.
Frank Sinatra's singing mesmerizes you. In fact, it gets so symbolic sometimes
that you can't make the relationship with him as a man, even though you may
know him. Bennett's professionalism doesn't block you off. It even suggests
that maybe you'll see him later at the beer parlor." For all that,
Bennett, a ceaseless experimenter, is an elusive singer. He can be a belter who
reaches rocking fortissimos. He drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as
Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key,
searching supper-club performer. (He has gone through visual changes as well.
He for a while affected a short haircut and was wont to come onstage with his
shirt collar open and his jacket slung carefully over one shoulder. Now, with
the disappearance of most of his hair — an occupational hazard that has
likewise afflicted Crosby and Sinatra — he wears a variety of stunningly
accomplished transformations. He also keeps his jacket on, and is often seen
onstage in a necktie.)
But Bennett's
voice binds all his vocal selves together. It is pitched slightly higher than
Sinatra's (it was once a tenor, but it has deepened over the years), and it has
a rich, expanding quality that is immediately identifiable. It has a joyous,
jubilant quality, a pleased, shouting-within quality. It has, in a modest way,
something of the hallelujah strain of Mahalia Jackson….
… Bennett is at the back table of the ground
floor of the Amalfi, on East Forty-eight `Street. He has been eating at the
Amalfi since the days, twenty and more years ago, when it was a one-room place
on West Forty-seventh. Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee sportscaster and former Yankee
shortstop, is a couple of tables away, and Bennett greets him and sends a drink
to his table. Bennett is to sing a couple of songs at ten o'clock at a benefit, and he has ordered a light
supper of macaroni shells stuffed with ricotta and a bottle of Chianti
classico. Bennett has the sort of face that is easily sculptured by light.
In broad daytime,
he tends to look jagged and awkwardly composed: his generous Roman nose booms
and his pale green eyes become slits. But the subdued lighting in the Amalfi
makes him handsome and compact. His eyes become melancholy and shine darkly,
the deep lines that run past his mouth are stoical, and his nose is regal. His
voice, though, never changes. It is a singer's voice — soft, slightly hoarse,
and always on the verge of sliding into melody. Rizzuto calls over and thanks
Bennett for the drink, and Bennett nods and raises his wineglass in Rizzuto's
direction. "I'm not that crazy about singing at big benefits,"
Bennett says, "but Ed Sullivan, who's running this one, has been good to
me and I like him. I like concert halls, and what I do now is pick the best
halls here and abroad, and give just one concert on Friday night and one on
Saturday. I do that about thirty weekends a year. It's much nicer working
concert halls than nightclubs. The audience holds on to every inch of
intonation and inflection. But nightclubs teach performers like me. They teach
you spontaneity. They teach you to keep your sense of humor. They teach you to
keep your cool. All of which I needed not long ago when I gave a concert in Buffalo and decided to experiment by not using a
microphone. The hall isn't that big and they could hear me, but I guess without
the microphone I just didn't sound like me. So people started shouting. But I
remembered what Ben Webster —the great, late Ben Webster —once told me: ‘If I
had it to do all over again, I'd leave my anger offstage.’ And I did. I went
backstage and got a mike, and everything was all right. In addition to my
concerts, I do television specials, like the one Lena Home and I did — just the
two of us, no one else — a while back. It got very nice notices, which proves
you just don't need all those trappings. I also work in Vegas, and at Bill
Harrah's places in Lake
Tahoe and Reno, for six weeks a year. Vegas is great,
with all the performers on one strip, like a kind of super-Fifty-second Street.
They can afford anything, and they treat performers marvelously. But Bill
Harrah is fabulous. I think he started out with bingo parlors in Reno thirty-five years ago, and now he owns
these big places in Tahoe and Reno and has a huge collection of classic cars.
He meets you at the airport with a Rolls-Royce and gives you the keys to the
car and a beautiful home with a pool. At the end of the engagement, he throws a
party for you in his own home. It's like some kind of fantastic vacation."
Bennett takes a
forkful of shells and a sip of wine. "It's beautiful not to compromise in
what you sing, and yet I've done business since I had my first record hit for Columbia, in nineteen fifty-one. I've always tried to do the cream of the
popular repertoire and yet remain commercial. Hanging out with good songs is
the secret. Songs like 'All the Things You Are' and 'East of the Sun' are just
the opposite of singing down. And so are these lyrics, which Alec Wilder wrote
and sent me a few days ago. He said if I liked them he'd set them to music. I
think they're beautiful." Bennett pulled a sheet of onionskin letter paper
out of his pocket. The lyrics read:
GIVE
ME THAT WARM
FEELING
Give me that warm feeling
That makes me believe again,
Give me that soft answer,
The kind you gave me way back when.
Give me some true kindness
That brightens the sky again.
Give me the best that's in you
And encouragement now and then.
Dust off those long-lost manners!
Bury ambition and guile!
Unfurl those lovely banners
Of virtue and laughter and style!
Give me that warm feeling,
Take off that impersonal glove.
Remember, remember, we're dealing
With that fair and that rare thing called
love!
"I love
singing too much to cheat the public. And I can't ever lose that spirit by
listening to the money boys, the Broadway wise guys who used to tell me, If
you don't sing such-and-such, you'll end up with a classy reputation and no
bread in the bank.' But if I lost that spirit, my feeling for music would run
right out the window. It's this obsolescence thing in America, where cars are made to break down and
songs written to last two weeks. But good songs last forever, and I've come to
learn
that there's a
whole group out there in the audience who's studying that with me. There's a
greatness in an audience when it gets perfectly still. It becomes a beautiful
tribal contact, a delicate, poetic thing. A great song does that. It also works
two ways: the performer makes the song work, and the song inspires the
performer.
"All kinds of
things go through my head when I'm singing. I think of Joanna [his young
daughter] a lot. I think of things from my past; I even see them. If I'm working in a beautiful place like Festival Hall,
in London, I think of the great lighting, the great
clusters of light, and they inspire me. If a song is truly believable, it becomes
a self-hypnosis thing. And when that happens I automatically start thinking a
line ahead, like when I serve at tennis and am already thinking of the next
shot. My concentration becomes heavy, so that if I forget the words I can do
what Harold Arlen told me: 'Just make up new words in the right spirit and
don't let anybody know, and you'll be all right.'
"I've always
liked the Billie Holiday tradition of allowing the musicians you're working
with to take charge and to solo, and my arrangements are always written that
way. Jazz musicians create great warmth and feeling. When they play well, they
make you sing, too. I've worked with Bobby Hackett and Woody Herman and Duke
Ellington and Stan Kenton and Count Basie. And I've worked with Harry Edison
and Jimmy Rowles and Tommy Flanagan and Zoot Sims and John Bunch and Billy
Exiner. You can't beat the perfection of Basie. He even talks the way he plays:
one or two words take care of conversation for the month. Like when he saw the
distance he'd have to go to reach his piano on this tiny, miserable stage we
were working on somewhere out West.
'Man, that's a long walk,' he said."
Bennett laughs,
and tells the waiter, a diminutive carry-over from the old Amalfi, that he
doesn't have time for espresso but that he will see him soon. He waves to
Rizzuto. …
Bennett is due at three o'clock at a studio on Christopher Street, where he will rehearse with the Ruby
Braff-George Barnes Quartet. The quartet is to accompany him at Alice Tully
Hall. Edith sets the table in the studio and brings in a chicken salad and a
large glass of boysen-berry juice. "Man, tennis has nothing on that
kiteflying," Bennett says. "But all that running around will make me
sing better this afternoon. Maybe if I'd known about it a long time ago, it
would have gotten my career going a lot faster. The way it was, I didn't become
any sort of authoritative singer until I was twenty-seven. For seven years
before that, I scuffled. After the war, I used the GI Bill to study at the
American Theater Wing, where I worked on bel canto with Peter D'Andrea. And I
studied voice with Miriam Speir. It was at her place I first met Alec Wilder. I
never passed any auditions, and I worked as an elevator man at the Park
Sheraton, in an uncle's grocery store, as a runner for the AP, and as a singing
waiter out in Astoria, where I was born.
I was born in
August of nineteen twenty-six, as Anthony Dominick Benedetto. I'm using Benedetto again to sign
my paintings. We lived in a little two-story house in Astoria which is still there. My father came over
from Italy in nineteen twenty-two, but I don't know much about him, because
he died when I was nine. He had a grocery store on Fifty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, where the CBS Building is now. I remember he was a beautiful man,
who was much loved by his family and friends. He had an open, warm voice, full
of love and melody, and he sang beautifully. He'd always get the family out on
Sundays to sing and dance. My mother, whose maiden name was Surace, was born
down on Mott and Hester Streets, and she lives out in River Edge, New Jersey.
After my father
died, she went to work in the garment district and put my brother and sister
and me through school. She has spirit and that great gift of common sense. Judy
Garland went crazy over her when she met her. I went to P.S. Seven and Junior
High School One-forty-one, out in Astoria, and then I went to the High School of Industrial Arts, which used to be near the Waldorf-Astoria.
It was way ahead of its time. I studied music and painting, and they'd work it
so that you didn't have to be there every day, so long as you did your work.
You could go over to the park and sketch trees. I had a music teacher named
Sonberg, and he'd bring a Victrola into class and play Art Tatum records.
Imagine that! It was around then I decided to be a singer.
Of course, I'd
been singing all my life and in the shadow of show business. I had an uncle in Astoria who was a hoofer in vaudeville and worked
for the Shuberts. He'd tell me about Harry Lauder and James Barton and how they
were humble people who had their feet on the ground. He'd tell me about Bill
Robinson and how he had to follow him once and it almost killed him. He'd tell
me how the acts in those days honed their shows all the way across the country
and back, so that when they finally got to the Palace in New York they were sharp and ready. I had my first professional
job when I was thirteen, at one of those Saturday-night get-togethers at a
Democratic club in Astoria, and later I sang at little clubs by myself when they'd let
me."
(Harry Celentano,
a bellman at the Algonquin, who went to school with Bennett, remembers those
days: "He used to sing 'God Bless America' and The Star-Spangled Banner'
in assemblies, and when he was a little older he'd go into places out there
like the Horseshoe Bar and the Queen of Hearts — this quiet, shy little kid —
and get up and sing all by himself. Some of us would go with him, and he'd
stand there and sing 'Cottage for Sale' like a soft Billy Eckstine. We didn't
take him seriously, and we'd shout and throw peanuts at him, but he never
batted an eye. But he was also into art then. He would play hooky and draw
these huge, beautiful murals right on the street, with chalk. Mothers and
children would stop and watch, and they were amazed. Then we'd come along and
play football over the mural, and that was that.")
The concert at
Alice Tully the next evening is billed as "An Evening with Rodgers and
Hart," and it is a smooth and engaging success. The hall is sold out, and
the audience is hip. Bennett sings the verses of most of the songs, and by the
time he gets a note or two into the chorus there is the applause of recognition.
He is in a dinner jacket, and his stage manner is startlingly old-fashioned: he
uses a hand mike, and he whips the cord around as though it were a lariat; he
half-dances, half-falls across the stage during rhythm numbers; he salutes the
audience and points at it. He is clumsy and at the same time delightful. He
sings twenty-one Rodgers and Hart tunes, and many are memorable. He sings a
soft, husky "Blue Moon," and then comes a marvelous, muted Ruby Braff
solo. "There's a Small Hotel" is even softer, and Braff and George
Barnes react with pianissimo statements. The group, indeed, is impeccable. The
solos are beautiful, and the dynamics all anticipate Bennett's.
During Braff’s
solo in "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," Bennett sits on a
stool to the musicians' right, and near the end of "I Wish I Were in Love
Again" he forgets his lyrics and soars over the wreckage with some good
mumbo-jumbo and a fine crescendo. "Lover" is ingenious. Bennett sings
it softly, at a medium tempo (it is usually done at top speed), then briefly
takes the tempo up, and goes out sotto voce. He does "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" as an encore. The ovation is long
and standing.
After a small
backstage party, Bennett gets into his limousine and is driven home. He settles
deep into a corner of the car. "It's what I used to dream of — a concert
in a big hall like Alice Tully. But it hasn't all been smoothness since I
started doing business. When I had my first record hits, in the early fifties,
I suddenly found myself with an entourage, most of them takers. And I didn't
like it. Maurice Chevalier was doing a one-man show here around then, and all
he had was a piano and a hat, and that made me realize I was off on the wrong
foot. Then I've
been through a divorce and done a little time on the psychiatrist's couch. But
I don't think I need that. Most of the people who go to psychiatrists, their
hearts and minds have never caught on to any one desire. I never had that
problem. But I had a different one when Frank Sinatra came out in Life and said I was the greatest singer
around. Sophie Tucker once told me, 'Make sure that helium doesn't hit your
brain,' but it did, and for several years, to match up to his praise, I
overblew, I oversang. But I've found my groove now. I'm solidifying everything,
and working toward my own company. You learn how to hang on to money after a
while. I like to live well, but I'm not interested in yachts and fancy cars.
There are things I'm searching for, but they won't take a day. I'd like to
attain a good, keen intellect.
Alec Wilder set
one of William Blake's poems to music for me, and I was reading Blake last
night. Imagine being that talented and feeling so much at the same time! I'd
like to make more movies. I played a press agent in The Oscar, and I loved the whole make-believe about it. I'd like my
own regular TV show, which would be devoted to good music. None of that stuff with the musicians off camera and the
shots full of dancers.
I like the funny
things in this life that could only happen to me now. Once, when I was singing
Kurt Weill's 'Lost in the Stars' in the Hollywood Bowl with Basic's band and
Buddy Rich on drums, a shooting star went falling through the sky right over my
head, and everyone was talking about it, and the next morning the phone rang
and it was Ray Charles, who I'd never met, calling from New York. He said 'Hey,
Tony, how'd you do that, man?' and hung up."”
