The New Yorker & Me: Postscript: Tony Bennett 1926

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Saturday, July 22, 2023

Postscript: Tony Bennett 1926 - 2023

Tony Bennett (Photo by Wyatt Counts)

I see in the Times that Tony Bennett died. He is the subject of one of Whitney Balliett’s finest pieces – “A Quality That Let’s You In” (The New Yorker, January 7, 1974; included in his great 1979 collection American Singers). Balliett called Bennett an “elusive singer.” He wrote,

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. 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 quality, a pleased, shouting-within quality. It has, in a modest way, something of the hallelujah strain of Mahalia Jackson.

Balliett described Bennett’s face as being “easily sculptured by light.” He said,

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 [where Bennett was having supper] made him handsome and compact. His eyes became melancholy and shone darkly, the deep lines that run past his mouth were stoical, and his nose was regal. His voice, though, never changed. It is a singer’s voice – soft, slightly hoarse, and always on the verge of sliding into melody.

I’m listening to Bennett’s superb 2015 album The Silver Lining, as I write this. The way he nails the soaring high note at the end of Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays” is thrilling. To think he was almost ninety when he did that. The guy was a marvel – one of the great jazz singers of all time.