Tony Bennett: Swinging with the stars

The singer once said it’s not where you start that counts, but where you finish, and finishing’s not on his agenda. “I am very healthy,” he says several times. “My doctor says, ‘Do what you want, there is nothing wrong with you.’ I feel like I am just starting out.” He has just finished a book tour (with the odd concert thrown in) promoting his memoir, Just Getting Started, and a full tour is planned for 2017. He still paints, primarily watercolours, almost every day. One of his pictures hangs in the Smithsonian.

“I love what I do. To make people feel good is the most wonderful profession you could ever be in.”

In America, Bennett is so far beyond national-treasure status, they should invent a new category. He had his first hit in 1951. Both Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra named him their favourite singer. Fred Astaire told him “You’re it”, as did the jazz legends Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Bill Evans. Since 2006, he has recorded three smash-hit Duets albums (including one with songs in Spanish and Portuguese), and among the singing partners who rushed to record with him were George Michael, Bono, Sting, Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Willie Nelson and Queen Latifah. He has recorded more than 70 albums, won 19 Grammys and sold more than 50m records.

He has sung for 11 presidents, but is unlikely to make it 12. “We have to put up with Trump,” he says. He still likes Bill Clinton, who contributed an essay to the new album, describing him as “the first president I met that I didn’t have to stand to attention to. I could walk up with my hands in my pockets and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing today?’”

Bennett is not quite so revered in the UK. Despite a crowd-stopping show at Glastonbury in 1998, he possibly hasn’t toured here enough to really capture the iTunes generation. Memories of his classic jazz work have been passed over in favour of the Duet albums, dominated by the heart-rending Body and Soul, which he cut with Amy Winehouse — memorable as her final recording.

He is the only superstar singer I have met who seems truly without ego. One way to understand his calm and contentment is to watch the 2012 documentary The Zen of Bennett. “I never wanted to be bigger than anyone else,” he explains, “I just wanted to be one of the best.”

After 65 years, he has achieved more than that. “Without Tony Bennett’s music,” says the director Martin Scorsese, “my films and my life would have been dramatically different. His music now runs through my life like a river that never stops flowing.”

Bennett looks for the best in everybody, complimenting my notebook and suit twice. Ellington told him to credit the writers and the singer who first made a song famous. So he always does. He surrounds himself with “jazz musicians who don’t play a note unless they believe it — by doing that, you never sing a song the same way twice”. He was the first white singer to perform with Count Basie, and threw up in the street after hearing Charlie Parker play (“The greatest thing I ever heard”), while he describes the mid-1970s albums he cut with Bill Evans, “who heard notes that nobody else did”, as “the most prestigious albums I ever made”.

“I like the big jazz artists,” he says. “Louis Armstrong — he still lives in my mind — Basie and Ellington. That was the dance band-period, they were fabulous. But then it became a money thing. Before it was art. Now the money is first. I do make more money from my records now, but I have always done quality, so the songs don’t sound out of date 20 years later.”

Anthony Benedetto grew up in Astoria, New York. His grocer dad, John, an immigrant from Calabria, died when he was 10, leaving his youngest son his love of art and a compassion for others. “Astoria was a good neighbourhood, every nationality was there, and my dad showed me that we are different, but we are all the same. He had a reputation as an excellent singer in Italy, while my brother was also wonderful, but he didn’t ever want it. I was thinking, ‘I would give anything to be as popular as he is.’ So I went for it, and I am still doing it.”

In 1944, Bennett was working as a singing waiter (“I loved the gig”) when he was drafted. For the last few months of the war, he fought, froze and survived on the front line, before helping to liberate a concentration camp. “That made me a pacifist. I’m against any war, it’s hell.” The war over, he started singing with the 314th Army Special Services Band as “Joe Bari”. The deluxe CD of his new album includes a raw recording of St James Infirmary by him as a 19-year-old, channelling emotions he should never have had to encounter.

Returning to America, Bennett went back to waiting tables and studied bel canto vocal techniques (which he credits for the longevity of his career) thanks to the GI Bill. Bob Hope suggested a name change, and in 1951 he had his first million-seller, Because of You, followed by a lush cover of Hank Williams’s Cold Cold Heart. (“The first country song that ever became popular. Hank liked my version so much, he’d play it over and over again on the jukebox.”) After a decade working with jazz greats, he recorded his signature tune, I Left My Heart in San Francisco. There is now a statue of him outside the city’s Fairmont Hotel, but perhaps the anthem marked him in the public mind as a crooner, rather than a great singer.

Bennett does not do what-might-have-been. He has held true to the Great American Songbook: Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Gershwin and later additions like Alan and Marilyn Bergman, and Sondheim. “It was an amazing period of art that no longer exists in America. Songs have got cheaper and cheaper — there was more quality years ago. I’d love to have written my own songs, but I don’t have that gift... But I can interpret, and I have spent my life interpreting wonderful composers.”

It wasn’t just music that drove him. In 1965, Harry Belafonte was recruiting artists to join the civil-rights marches in Alabama. “Tony was the first to respond to my call,” Belafonte recalled. After the third march, Bennett performed an impromptu set on a stage made of empty coffins. The next day, Viola Liuzzo, a civil-rights protester, took him to the airport. Driving back, she was killed by Klan members. “One of the illnesses of the world is racial prejudice,” Bennett says, preferring not to dwell on dark memories. “The white race is not superior. There are all sorts of nationalities in this country and people should be accepted for who they are.”

In 1979, after the collapse of his record label, a near-fatal cocaine addiction and an IRS legal claim on his house, Bennett enlisted the aid of his son, Danny. “I grew up having Sunday dinners with Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, playing basketball with Stan Getz, hanging out with [the promoter] Sid Bernstein,” Danny says. “I was in Bill Graham’s office backstage at the Fillmore when he decided to close it because of Woodstock.”

He took his father to the college crowd, who loved his tailored suits, his liberal beliefs and his voice like no other. He was the first guest star on The Simpsons, made the ultimate MTV Unplugged album and shared a stage with Nine Inch Nails and PJ Harvey in front of a young audience of 60,000. Danny jokes that his father “never sings the same thing once, he is always reinventing himself — which is why he has remained relevant. He didn’t bridge the generation gap, he destroyed it. He made it OK to be listening to Billie Holliday and Pearl Jam, Sinatra and the Pixies.”

In a reversal of the conventional way of things, Bennett has become Lady Gaga’s muse since they collaborated on Cheek to Cheek, a US No 1 album. His influence is all over her new album, Joanne. “Tony has taught me never to give up, never to stop. He restored my passion for music. My life has changed so much putting out those records — singing jazz was like being a teenager again,” Gaga says, admitting that there is more to the relationship than music. “Who do I call when I am in heartbreak but Tony Bennett?” Actually, out of Italian propriety, she calls his wife, Susan, who hands the phone straight over.

“Gaga is different from anybody else I have met recently,” Bennett says. “She has the gift, she can do the whole thing — she can perform, she composes and plays piano, she had good personal training at NYU and Juilliard. Education makes a difference.”

Having had little formal education himself, Bennett is determined that others should be more fortunate. He set up Exploring the Arts, an education charity, with Susan, his third wife, a former schoolteacher almost four decades his junior. The lead school is the Frank Sinatra School of Performing Arts. “Proper etiquette,” he says, for it was Sinatra’s endorsement that made him. “We have 34 schools across America. It’s terrific to see what they are doing. They come up with so many creative things.”

So does he. He’s planning on speeding up, not slowing down. As I leave the charity’s aftershow party, he is still deep in conversation with his guests.

Tony Bennett Celebrates 90: The Best Is Yet to Come is out now