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. 

Cécile McLorin Salvant / Jerome Kern / Alec Wilder / Lorenz Hart

Last night, searching Cécile McLorin Salvant’s name on YouTube, I found her 2016 “Live in Budapest,” with Renee Rosnes (piano), Rodney Whitaker (bass), and Louis Nash (drums). What a terrific concert! Salvant sings “Easy to Love,” “The Gentleman Is A Dope,” “Never Will I Marry,” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” “All Through the Night,” “Cry Butterfly, Cry,” among others – all swinging! It whetted my appetite for more Salvant. YouTube is loaded with her videos.

I watched one of her singing “Yesterdays,” accompanied by the Aaron Diehl Trio. Wow! That song is gorgeous, drenched in melancholy. Who wrote it? I couldn’t remember. I looked it up in Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song (1972). Answer: Jerome Kern. Wilder writes, “It is an extraordinarily evocative song, simple in construction, narrow in range (a tenth), and unforgettable.” I agree. Reading Wilder, I got thinking about his writing. He wrote one of my all-time favorite New Yorker reviews – “Orange Juice for One” (October 18, 1976), an assessment of a book of tributes to Lorenz Hart called Thou Swell, Thou Witty. Here’s a sample:

Hart was a contemporary of Ira Gershwin, E. Y. Harburg, John Mercer, Otto Harbach, Dorothy Fields, Cole Porter, Howard Dietz, and Oscar Hammerstein II, After careful examination of the work of these people, I still find myself returning to the two who most please and nourish me: Lorenz Hart and John Mercer. And I believe that the reason for this is by no means that they were such masters of their craft but that in their craft they were vulnerable to the point of self-revelation. And in revealing themselves they also revealed their profound need to put to paper their attitudes toward love, life, irony, absurdity, loneliness, and loss. The other lyricists wrote well, but I never sensed that need, that hunger. I was aware of craft and cleverness, style and polish, but no deep self-involvement.

Wilder knew what he was talking about. He wrote at least two songs that have entered the Great American Songbook: “I’ll Be Around” and “While We’re Young.” I’d love to hear Salvant sing them.