
Somehow, his closeness to jazz related him to Frank SinatraAlthough he had his own style, being a balladeer with incredible expressiveness, a capacity to transmit that placed him – all his success by himself – among the favorites of the public. Furthermore, in 1957 he launched The Beat Of My Heart with musicians from the jazz scene such as Art Blakey, Jo Jones, Herbie Mann, Nat Adderley and their collaborations with the Count Basie orchestra and that remembered hit Chicago. His voice, his warmth and that disarming smilee they managed to generate a current of affection for Bennett that exceeded the fashions When rock and roll broke out in the mid-1950s, the artist hardly felt the effects of this powerful shift on young people’s tastes. At his most successful moment, he performed seven times a day, starting at 10:30 in the morning.

In 1952, Cold, Cold Heart Y Blue Velvet were important successes and that led him to appear at the Paramount Theater, New York, up to seven times a day, s u first show was at 10:30 in the morning. In 1949, Bob Hope discovered him at a club in Greenwich Village, took him on tour, and shortened his name to Tony Bennett.Īfter the success of Because of You, which spent ten weeks among the ten best-selling albums and surpassed one million copies sold, Bennett focused on developing a very commercially oriented career. He returned to New York in 1946 where, with jazz at its best, he learned the bel canto technique and studied the style and phrasing of two great improvisers, the saxophonist Stan Getz and the pianist Art Tatum.


He studied music and painting at the School of Industrial Art in New York, which he left at 16 to work and be able to help his family financially At 18, in 1944, at the end of World War II, he enlisted as an infantry rifleman and after his transfer to France participated in Germany in the last attacks against Nazism, an experience that he defined as a “front row seat in hell.” Again in new york At ten he was already singing with his uncle, Dick, a tap dancer, but he was not only attracted to singing, but also to drawing, in which he looked like a cartoonist as a child. He grew up amid the poverty of a country hit by the severe economic depression of 1929.īut in his environment there was music listened to Al Jonson, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, and jazz artists like Louis Armstrong or his countryman, Joe Venutti. came to participate as an infantryman in World War II, in Europe. His first record, Because of You, in 1951, showed a talented young man with a splendid voice, with a jazzy bent and a profile clearly of crooner.Īnthony Benedetto was born on August 3, 1926, in Queens, New York, the son of an Italian-American family. Tony Bennett has more than 70 record works, just over 50 million records sold, some of them like I Left My Heart in San Francisco (1962), MTV Unplugged: Tony Bennett (1994) the Duets, An American Classic (2006) absolute sales records and 19 Grammy Awards. She told of the Alzheimer’s disease that the singer suffers from. Tony Bennett and his wife Susan Crow, 40 years his junior. There had already been clear signals during the recording of the album with Lady Gaga and her terse interventions throughout the album’s dissemination work.ĭespite the disease, diagnosed in 2016, Bennett has shown in recent years a powerful energy after his album with Lady Gaga, he released The Silver Linings, with the music of composer Jerome Kern, in 2016 and Love Is Here To Stay with pianist and singer Diana Krall, in 2018.Īn artistic career that began lukewarm in 1936, with only ten years and ends in 2021, with 95, a whole record that was reflected in a significant number of great record works, such as his two albums with the Count Basie orchestra, in the fifties, or those two beautiful albums in a duet with the pianist Bill Evans in the 1970s. Bennett suffers, perhaps it is not the right word since he is not aware of what he suffers, of this incurable, unpredictable disease that places the patient in a position of enormous fragility.

His wife sought with the advertisement to help break that stigma that persecutes mental illness and in which we could include cancer. Instagram photo The announcement of his Alzheimer’s
