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Goodbye, Mr. Bennett [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-21  

I knew the end was, if not immediate, I could imagine it happening, back in 2016 when word was that Tony Bennett had been diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease. It gave me pause. I briefly ruminated on the possibility that at 73 myself back then, could I be much further behind Mr. Bennett?

This morning, as I opened my Washington Post, there it was: the last of my favorite three male pop/jazz singers had finally passed to the angels, joining Sinatra and Torme in a trio which can only be heard in heaven.

To listen to Bennett sing from the Great American Songbook, especially with small combos, was pure salve. It was a way to get in touch with the sheer joy of music and that uniquely human ability to be emotionally touched by combinations of sound and word. Though Bennett could belt them out with the best of them (his Carngie Hall concert bears that out) it was his smaller settings which really set him apart.

His arguably greatest recorded album, which he made with the late BIll Evans in 1996, the greatest jazz pianist of his time, simply still stands out like a beacon in an age which seemed to abandon “classical” pop music. Evans, on solo piano, with his absolutely impeccable harmonic progressions—there but not there—as Tony shaped vowel and consonant into lyrical poetry. Years ago, when I first heard their version of “Some Other Time” (Leonard Bernstein, Adolph Green, Betty Comden) I was left nearly weeping, reliving a broken relationiship I had years before.

And now Tony Bennett, my personal “last of the best, is a deserving chapter in music text books, yes, but also among the least dusty albums in jazz collections everywhere, I can imagine. The music of his time is, well, timeless but its performance—by the likes of Tony Bennett and Bill Evans Is just in an exalted place of its own.

Farewell, Mr. Bennet.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/21/2182576/-Goodbye-Mr-Bennett

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