Legendary crooner Tony Bennett dead at 96

Tony Bennett, the eminent and timeless stylist whose devotion to classic American songs and knack for creating new standards such as I Left My Heart In San Francisco graced a decades-long career that brought him countless admirers, has died. He was 96, just two weeks short of his birthday.

Publicist Sylvia Weiner confirmed Bennett's death to The Associated Press, 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.

The last of the great saloon singers of the mid-20th century, Bennett often said his lifelong ambition was to create "a hit catalogue rather than hit records." He released more than 70 albums and won 19 Grammy Awards among 41 nominations in a career that saw him collaborate with artists across several genres, including pairings with Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse and Canadian singers k.d. lang and Diana Krall.

Bennett didn't tell his own story when performing; he let the music speak instead — the Gershwins and Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Unlike his friend and mentor Frank Sinatra, he would interpret a song rather than embody it.

If his singing and public life lacked the high drama of Sinatra's, Bennett appealed with an easy, courtly manner and an uncommonly rich and durable voice — "A tenor who sings like a baritone," he called himself — that made him a master of caressing a ballad or brightening an up-tempo number.

"I enjoy entertaining the audience, making them forget their problems," he told The Associated Press in 2006. "I think people … are touched if they hear something that's sincere and honest and maybe has a little sense of humour…. I just like to make people feel good when I perform."

Bennett was praised often by his peers, but never more meaningfully than by what Sinatra said in a 1965 Life magazine interview: "For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more."

He not only survived the rise of rock music but endured so long and so well that he gained new fans and collaborators, some young enough to be his grandchildren.

WATCH l 'You have to believe in the song,' Bennett tells CBC:

How singer Tony Bennett became Tony Bennett

45 years ago

Duration 17:42

The man Frank Sinatra called "the best singer in the business" talks about his career with the CBC's Peter Gzowski in 1977.

In 2014, at age 88, Bennett broke his own record as the oldest living performer with a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart for Cheek to Cheek, his duets project with Lady Gaga. Three years earlier, he topped the charts with Duets II, featuring such contemporary stars as Gaga, Carrie Underwood and Winehouse, in her last studio recording.

For Bennett, one of the few performers to move easily between pop and jazz, such collaborations were part of his crusade to expose new audiences to what he called the Great American Songbook.

"No country has given the world such great music," Bennett said in a 2015 interview with Downbeat Magazine. "Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern. Those songs will never die."

Canadian collaborators

In 2018, he embarked on the Love Is Here To Stay album with Krall of Nanaimo, B.C.

Years earlier, Bennett and lang played a series of tour dates in support of their 2002 album, A Wonderful World.

While a quintessential American performer, he spoke glowingly of his long relationship with Canadian audiences while speaking to CBC's The Hour in 2012.

"Since 1960, I've played from Vancouver to Montreal, every city in Canada, through the years. You get to love the people who treat you well and you love them right back."

Bennett had periods of struggle, suffering a near-fatal cocaine overdose in the late 1970s. He lamented not being able to help Winehouse, whose drug-related death occurred just a few weeks before they were slated to play a London concert in 2011.

"I was gonna tell her to slow down because I had a drug problem when I was younger and I stopped doing it and it changed my life for the better," he told The Hour.

Claimed by New York City, San Francisco

Long associated with San Francisco, Bennett would note that his true home was Astoria, the working-class community in the New York City borough of Queens, where he grew up during the Great Depression. The singer chose his old neighbourhood as the site for the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, that he and his third wife, Susan Crow Benedetto, a former teacher, helped found in 2001.

The school is not far from the birthplace of the man who was once Anthony Dominick Benedetto. His father was an Italian immigrant who inspired his love of singing, but he died when Anthony was 10. Bennett credited his mother, Anna, with teaching him a valuable lesson as he watched her working at home, supporting her three children as a seamstress doing piecework after his father died.

"We were very impoverished," Bennett said in a 2016 AP interview. "I saw her working and every once in a while she'd take a dress and throw it over her shoulder and she'd say, 'Don't have me work on a bad dress. I'll only work on good dresses."'

He studied commercial art in high school, but had to drop out to help support his family. The teenager got a job as a copy boy for the Associated Press, performed as a singing waiter and competed in amateur shows.

A combat infantryman during the Second World War, he served as a librarian for the Armed Forces Network after the war and sang with an army big band in occupied Germany. His earliest recording is a 1946 air check from Armed Forces Radio of the blues song St. James Infirmary.

Championed civil rights

In 1950, Mitch Miller, the head of Columbia Records' pop singles division, signed Bennett and released the single, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, a semi-hit. Bennett was on the verge of being dropped from the label in 1951 when he had his first No. 1 on the pop charts with Because of You. More hits followed, including Rags to Riches and Blue Velvet.

Released in 1962 as the B-side of of another song, I Left My Heart in San Francisco, the reflective ballad became a grassroots phenomenon staying on the charts for more than two years and earning Bennett his first two Grammys, including record of the year.

Bennett's friendship with Black musicians and his disgust at the racial prejudice he encountered in the Army led him to become an active supporter of the civil rights movement. He answered Harry Belafonte's call to join Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march and perform for the protesters.

By his early 40s, he was seemingly out of fashion musically, though he continued releasing albums into the 1970s. On the personal front his first two marriages dissolved, in 1971 and 1984.

With the help of his son and manager Danny, he became hip with new generations of fans. He wore a black T-shirt and sunglasses as a presenter with the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the 1993 MTV Music Video Awards, and his Tony Bennett: MTV Unplugged album from 1994 won two Grammys, including album of the year.

Bennett was named a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2005 and won two Emmy Awards for television specials, in 1996 and 2007.

Singer Tony Bennett says he tried to make recordings that would 'last forever'

16 hours ago

Duration 1:48

Tony Bennett, in an interview with Peter Gzowski in the 1970s, talked about his craft — and trying to make recordings that would hold up over time.

Besides singing, Bennett pursued his lifelong passion for painting by taking art lessons and bringing his sketchbook on the road. His paintings, signed with his family name Benedetto, were displayed in public and private collections, including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

He is survived by his wife, Susan, daughters Johanna and Antonia, sons Danny and Dae and nine grandchildren.