- I Can't Believe That You're in Love With Me
- Don't Get Around Much Anymore
- Stella by Starlight
- On Green Dolphin Street
- Let's Face the Music and Dance
- I'm Thru With Love
- Solitude (Live)
- Lullaby of Broadway (Live)
- Dancing in the Dark
- I Let A Song Go Out of My Heart
- When Lights Are Low
- Just One of Those Things
- Crazy Rhythm
- Street of Dreams
- Love Scene
- While the Music Plays On
- Close Your Eyes
- Out of This World
- Just Friends
- Have You Met Miss Jones
- Danny Boy
- Sweet Lorraine
If you go back with Tony Bennett to the very beginning of his career, in the early 1950s, you remember a balladeer who rendered with near-operatic intensity a string of Top-10 hits, including the million sellers "Because of You", "Cold, Cold Heart", "Rags to Riches", and "Stranger in Paradise". If you are of my generation, raised on Elvis and the Beatles, you recall Tony Bennett as an anomalous crooner with a voice like raw silk, a penthouse serenader in a world of pent-up screamers, who glided onto the pop charts with "I Wanna Be Around", "The Good Life", "If I Ruled the World", "For Once in My Life", and, of course, his signature song, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco".
But Tony Bennett's heart has always been in jazz. Though he is not a jazz sing per se (no scatting or blues shouting or radical reshaping of the melody), Bennett, 60, has from the outset worked with some of the very best jazz players and arrangers. He is one of the few singers - perhaps the only one - who can claim to have been backed by the orchestras of Ellington, Basie, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, and Buddy Rich; He's had charts written by Ralph Burns, Johnny Mandel, Neal Hefti, Quincy Jones and Gil Evans. His accompanists, as you will hear in this collection, have included Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Jo Jones, and Elvin Jones. On other occasions he has performed with Ruby Braff, Tommy Flanagan, and Harry "Sweets" Edison. And in the mid-1970s, he made two intimate and atmospheric albums with bill Evans, arguably the most influential jazz pianist of the past quarter-century.
Though many singers have recorded with the jazz greats, few are as knowledgeable and devoted to the music as Bennett. He can speak authoritatively about Miles Davis or John Coltrane or the brilliant Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento; and when he is on tour, as he was in London last fall, he makes a point of visiting clubs like Ronnie Scott's, where he twice heard his friend Art Blakey (who is also heard in this anthology) leading his latest Jazz Messengers. More important, Bennett credits jazz with sustaining his career, with winning him a new and ardent audience once the hit singles stopped coming.
Like Miles Davis or Stan Getz or Bill Evans, Bennett's artistry is about lyricism and shading and soul - as these 22 selections memorably illustrate.
(James Isaacs, January, 1987)
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