Tony Bennett, the artist whose devotion to classic American songs and his ability to create new standards like I Left My Heart In San Francisco graced a decades-long career that brought him fans from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga, died Friday. He was 96 years old, and it was only two weeks away from celebrating a new birthday for him.
Publicist Sylvia Weiner confirmed Bennett’s death to the AP agency, saying he died in his hometown of New York. There was no specific cause, but Bennett had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016.
Bennett, the last of the great lounge singers of the mid-20th century, used to say that his lifelong ambition was to create “a catalog of hits rather than hit records.” He released more than 70 albums, earning him 19 Grammy Awards, all but two of which came after his 60th birthday, and enjoyed deep and lasting affection from fans and other artists.
Bennett did not tell his own story when acting. Unlike his friend and mentor Sinatra, he would perform a song rather than embody it. If his singing and his public life lacked Sinatra’s high drama, Bennett appealed with an easy, courteous manner and an unusually rich, long-lasting voice: “A tenor who sings like a baritone,” he called himself.
“I enjoy entertaining the audience, making them forget their problems,” he said in 2006. “I think people… are moved if they hear something that’s sincere and honest and maybe has a bit of a sense of humor. I just like to make people feel good when I perform.”
Bennett was often praised by his peers, but never more significantly than Sinatra said in a 1965 Life magazine interview: “To me, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He turns me on when I look at him. He moves me He is the singer who conveys what the songwriter has in mind, and probably a bit more.
Not only did he survive the rise of rock music, but he endured so long and well that he gained new followers and collaborators, some young enough to be his grandchildren. In 2014, at age 88, Bennett broke his own record as the oldest living artist with a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart for Cheek to Cheek, his duets project with Lady Gaga.
Three years earlier, he had topped the charts with Duets II, featuring contemporary stars like Gaga, Carrie Underwood and Amy Winehouse, on his last studio recording. His relationship with Winehouse was captured in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Amy,” which showed Bennett patiently encouraging the insecure young singer through a rendition of Body and Soul.
